Transcript of this week’s podcast episode.

Part One

I wrote a book called ‘Practical Necromancy’. Or rather, I wanted to call it ‘Practical Necromancy’ but various folks felt that would be a bit off-putting. So instead, it ended up being called ‘An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead through Agent Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence’. It came out this past summer. The key idea in it, which I learned from the work and writing of Sara Perry, is the idea of ‘enchantment’ as a mode of being open to the world. Why does this matter? Perry points out that a lot of archaeological work is driven by a crisis-mode vision of the world: everything is being destroyed, collect the archaeology before it’s being gone. We’ll worry about what it means later. Perry draws on the political theorist Jane Bennett who sees ‘enchantment’ as a way to foster ethical engagement and care for the wider world. In archaeological terms, Perry sees that archaeological materials are the eruption of deep time into our every day world and so offer the potential to enchant us. Therefore, she writes,

I believe archaeology can change the world for the better through its inherent and highly distinctive capacity to generate wonder and enchantment among human beings.

Her advice to achieve enchantment is to ‘deliberately weave affective practices into all aspects of our archaeological methodologies and project designs, therein offering us a more contextual and dynamic model for doing, recording, interpreting, publicising and archiving archaeology.’

For me, this was an exciting article (it’s called ‘The Enchantment of the Archaeological Record’, and it was published in the European Journal of Archaeology. Look it up.) It was exciting because for many years I have been disenchanted with archaeology. Disenchanted with how we do it, what we pay attention to, and how we write it, that faux-objective third person voice. I got into archaeology because it fired my imagination. It let me see through time! And then I graduated, and was unemployed/unemployable for 8 years.

For my book then, I wanted to examine what it was that I found enchanting about digital archaeology; and since this was a very personal perspective, it’s ‘an enchantment’. I wanted to examine what was affective about doing digital archaeology. For me, it comes down to relationships. I can see relationships between individuals in the distant past, even if I don’t know who those individuals were. I can scale up those relationships, knitting them together into a network, and soon I can see the outlines of their social world. I can resurrect these networks in a simulation, and replay the past. Networks are capable of computation, and if treat for instance what someone wrote as a system of relationships (the probabilistic patterns of how they used words), I can resurrect their voice and have a conversation with them.

There’s a lot more detail to it than that, but that’s the gist of it. This week, I want you to feel something of that enchantment. The tasks all are facets of a kind of digital necromancy - not just raising the dead, but raising them to understand something of the culture they were once part of. You’ll spot the idea of ‘the network’ in many different ways in this week’s materials, whether it’s a literal network, or whether it’s a computational network that learns how to see.

But that’s just one vision of the future of digital archaeology. The readings this week will give you other perspectives. Perhaps it’s all just phygital.

Part Two

Raising the dead is of course a kind of simulation. This week we’re joined by Dr. Iza Romanowska, formerly of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and now at the University of Aarhuus in Denmark. Dr. Romanowska specializes in simulation and data science.

Hi everyone! My name is Iza Romanowska and I am a digital archaeologist working mostly on agent based simulations. I also do some data science from time to time and other types of simulations. I was asked by Shawn to have a few words with you and there’s a series of questions that I will try to honestly answer.

Alright - who am I? So at the moment I’m still the head of the social science, simulation, and digital Humanities research group at the Barcelona supercomputing Center but in about a week’s time I start a new position as a fellow at the Aarhus Institute of advanced studies in Aarhus Denmark and I’m currently working on two projects. I look at the demographics of Palmyra so you might have heard of it - mostly because Isis managed to blow up that amazing archaeological site - [it’s] located in the middle of a desert where people had more cash than they should if you ask me and so they spend their cash on all sorts of weird reasons; one of which was basically tombs and portraits and now thanks to them doing that and thanks for the find of the portraits because they were carved in stone so they preserve pretty well we have this amazing source of data in terms of funerary activity among Palmyra’s elite. So I look at this data and currently I’m just I’m just doing data analysis on it, seeing how the patterns in the data show ebbs and flows of the population in Palmyra. So that’s one project. But I also work on covid-19 like literally every single scientist in the world it seems. So my second project that I worked on right now is related to the contact tracing app and how can we establish whether it is going to work in terms of false positives and false negatives. So you’ve probably heard of those kinds of apps, pretty much every government has released one and they’re all based on the same engine but the thing is because we don’t have any data - they really do not collect any data about a user or the locations - we have no means of establishing what is the percentage of notifications that basically are false positives or false negatives. And that means that we use simulation to try to figure that and establish if it is worth doing it. The fact that you’re an archaeologist doesn’t mean you won’t be doing projects that are related to non archaeology! So this is something where having digital skills actually actually help with massively.

Alright so how did I get started in digital archaeology? I went to a workshop, they taught me how to do simulations and I thought, yeah, yeah, we should probably be doing it, so I’ll just do it. So that was a pretty quick story!

What is the biggest challenge facing digital archaeology at the moment? I think mostly the fact that people are lazy and not digital archaeologists, archaeologists in general! And they’re lazy in the sense that it’s so much easier to write an essay about something than to actually count things - I’m not even asking for statistical analysis - counting would be a first great step and then plotted and then maybe actually run some analysis and see whether it’s significant or not AND on the off chance people had loads of time you could for example formalize hypothesis and test them against those amazing patterns you get out of analysis. This is obviously something in digital archaeology we do a lot not because we’re better but because we’ve got the tools so we can actually do it. I think that the challenge is that it’s just so much more work and it’s highly frustrating, just compared to writing random thoughts about stuff and given that a lot of people build their career on writing random thoughts about stuff it is hard to convince the rest of them that this is not how we should progress. So I think this is the biggest challenge basically, getting people to do the work properly. By the way writing random thoughts about stuff is still useful, just less useful than writing non-random thoughts about stuff.

What drives me up the wall about how digital archaeology is currently received/perceived in the profession? Well, yeah, it’s that, it’s that people that basically had some kind of idea thing this an equivalent to thorough scientific study of that topic which obviously is not. But also there is one thing that really really annoys me which is perceiving people with very solid computation skills as technicians. As if reading a few articles in a few books and then thinking about something makes you a scholar but if you know techniques for data science that take years to learn then you’re just as IT person. That’s not the case, there’s a lot of scholarship in this kind of work as well.

So what fills me with hope about the field? Two things. One thing is that most of the funding nowadays is either four stem subjects which means we have to pretend to be one or for they’re generally open to all disciplines, like the funding landscape doesn’t look like arts, humanities can carry on on their own. And that means that, you have to use the right methods, you have to use proper scientific methods because otherwise you’re not going to get the money. so it kind of process of natural evolution and then, you know survival of the fittest, survival of the of the funded, sooner or later computational archaeology, not as a field but as a necessary techniques to do any scientific research will basically win over other types, and that fills me with hope I just hope this happens in my lifetime because I truly don’t care that much about what’s going to happen to the next generation; a little bit, but not that much. I think this has to shift because things shift, and it’s shifted in so many other disciplines, it’s shifted in biology, in geography, and so many social sciences are on the way so we’re basically the next in line and after we do it I think historians will actually move their bums towards counting things so that’s very exciting so I’m glad you guys are taking this class because you will be at the forefront of a grand revolution in the humanities, and I hope you have a lovely day and a lovely rest of the class