Archaeologists have lived with computers since the 1960’s. Much of the early work with the house-sized behemoths of the post-World War II era occurred in the context of statistical analyses, modeling, and other forms of data processing (Richards and Ryan 1985). Since those early days digital instruments and media have permeated every domain of archaeological production. New media are pervasive and yet surprisingly little experimental and critical engagement has taken place with them in archaeology (cf. Huggett 2000; Lock and Brown 2000, 2; Lock 2003, 264). A cursory survey of the burgeoning literature that falls under the rubric of ‘archaeological computing’ reveals a bifurcation in the discussion of new media, which falls loosely along the old yet familiar lines of practice and theory. First, a substantial portion of this literature is focused on the ‘use’ and ‘application’ of computers in archaeology. From the practical guides (McPherron and Dibble 2002) to the descriptively oriented papers associated with the proceedings of the annual Computer Application and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference (CAA) (Scollar 1999; also Lock 2003, 264), this literature tends to treat digital technologies as tools, as means to particular ends. Shannon McPerrron and Harold Dibble, for example, present their readers with descriptions of the various computer applications and their uses in everything from ‘data’ manipulation to topographical mapping (2002). For archaeologists who wish to marshal such digital troops, McPerron and Dibble lead us to believe that the passive digital things-in-themselves will accomplish whatever it is that archaeologists (human-in-themselves) wish to ask of them in our practice.

A second area of this literature has taken on a what is described as more critical perspective by questioning the use of new media technologies as passive, value-free means of documenting the material past (cf. the collection of papers in Lock and Brown 2000; Lock 2003). Gary Lock (in step with Huggett 2000), for example, critiques the practically oriented literature, as exemplified by the papers of the CAA, as extremely positivistic, showing little concern for the ‘deeper’ questions spawned by a theoretical treatment of computing (2003, 263-64). Against what he regards as positivist ‘technological utopianism,’ Lock argues for a more critical awareness associated with the recognition of archaeology as situated within a constant process of ‘becoming computerized’ (2003, 263).

This critical body of literature has also detailed the Internet as a network for the dispersal of otherwise situated narratives, information and sites in the context of globalization (Hodder 1999; Joyce 2002; Wolle and Tringham 2000). For Ian Hodder, the enabling technologies of the Internet allow for more non-hierarchical or horizontal relationships between various communities in the constitution of the past. Through the Internet, sites like Çatalhöyük disperse into multiple sites, fragment into multiple pasts, thus facilitating interactivity and multivocality in its ‘multi-sitedness’ (Hodder 1999, 193-200). But such seemingly altruistic agendas have not been without their detractors.

Adrian Chadwick has levied a critique of such understandings of IT by exposing the hierarchical infrastructures underneath the seemingly horizontal surface of the Internet (2003). I will return to both these points in my discussion of social software and hypertext below. For now, in juxtaposing these different takes concerning new media, I do not wish to repeat the discussion of the asymmetries to be found in the bifurcated camps of the discipline (refer to Chapter 1), which are in many ways repeated in the computer literature in archaeology (cf. Gidlow 2000). Rather I would like to emphasize that the vast majority of the archaeological computing overwhelming reproduces 19th century scenographies without much experimentation (also refer to Boast 2002, 570-574). This ability of new media to replicate previous modes falls under the rubric of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Gusin 1999).

For Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, remediation refers to the ways in which the new media of digital computing call back to and replicate already prevalent media and practices associated with writing technologies, more general information visualization (whether cartographic (GIS), 3-dimensional (VR) or graphic (Excel ‘data’ charts)), statistical analyses, photography, and so on (Bolter and Grusin 1999). Both Jeremy Huggett (2000) and Gray Lock (2003) have pointed to a tendency among archaeologists to embrace new media without much critical reflection upon why they are doing so. To be sure, new media speed things up, way up. From trench to the fine edge of Internet publication can now occur at the speed of one’s Internet connection (a far cry from the speed of information in the nineteenth century). New media also allow for more versatile aggregations of diverse media. But the remediative qualities of the new media enlisted by archaeologists is what maintains our exclusive reliance on the nineteenth century scenographic modes deployed by William Martin Leake, the French Expédition, or the likes of C.T. Newton in the context of Classical archaeology. While this is extremely important, I suggest we can and should do more.

In archaeology the computer is treated as the privileged interface for digital articulations. Most of what is produced can also be readily inscribed visually in two-dimensional paper-based forms. These two-dimensional scenographies continue to drive our modes of engagement because they are treated as the ultimate ‘end.’ Certainly there are exceptions (e.g. Lopiparo and Joyce 2003; Pearson and Shanks 2001; Tringham 2000—all transformations of other productions), but I suggest we can begin to do more by focusing on the action of these various media. In all, we need not be chained exclusively to our most necessary nineteenth century scenographies which facilitate consistent and repeatable practices. We can mix things up a bit more. We can extend the envelope of practice. But why would we want to do so?

In pushing for symmetry, I have repeatedly emphasized media as modes of engagement, where as bodily prostheses (also refer to: proprioception, media direct, orient and extend human sensation on the ground. Recently, Bjørnar Olsen has wonderfully detailed the strange paradox of how a concern for the materiality of text by post-structuralists spawned an interest in materiality as text by some thinkers within archaeology (2005). For Olsen, ‘{t}o conceive of our dealing with material culture as primarily an intellectual encounter, as signs or texts to be consciously read, is to deprive of things their otherness. It is to turn them into readerly, non-auratic, domesticated objects unable to ‘speak back’ in their own somatic way’ (2005, 97). More than simply text, and here I reiterate my awareness of the tyranny of the text at the expense of the idiosyncrasies of other modes of inscription, we regularly mobilize a host of media from maps and plans to diagrams and photographs in our articulation of the material past. Through new media we may accomplish more, but in attending to materiality after text (Olsen 2003), we must also learn ‘to understand without using concepts’ (Serres 1995, 125; in contrast to Thomas 2004b; 143), engage without boiling the material world down solely to language, and its subsidiary, meaning. In this way, I have endeavored to focus on the potentials of new media in manifesting something of the material world otherwise filtered out by our paper-based scenographies. But what do digital media do in relation to paper-based media? How might new media transform our engagements with place, landscape and the material world? It is toward these questions that I now turn.

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