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Archaeology and Big Data with Parker VanValkenburgh and Andy Dufton - Ep 133
235 Plays5 years ago
Paul and Chris have been saying for years that there is no digital archaeology because that implies there is archaeology that does NOT have a digital component. Well, that just doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Our guests today, Parker VanValkenburgh and Andy Dufton helped bring a supplement about digital archaeology and the ethical considerations to the Journal of Field Archaeology. They come on today to talk about it.
Parker VanValkenburgh is an archaeologist whose research focuses on landscapes, politics and environmental change in the Early Modern World – particularly, in late prehispanic and early colonial Peru. He received his Ph.D. in 2012 from Harvard University and previously held positions at the University of Vermont (Assistant Prof. of Anthropology, 2013-15) and Washington University in St. Louis (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2012-13). Among other projects, he is currently director of the Paisajes Arqueológicos de Chachapoyas (PACha) project, an investigation of long-term human-environment interaction in Peru's Chachapoyas region, grounded in the analysis of archaeological survey, archival research, remotely sensed datasets, and work with contemporary communities in the provinces of Luya, Chachapoyas, and Bongará, Amazonas (Peru). He is also a co-director of the GeoPACHA (Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, HIstory and Archaeology). At Brown, he directs the Brown Digital Archaeology Laboratory and teaches courses on Geographic Information Systems, cartography, critical digital archaeology, the politics of space and landscape, historical anthropology, and the archaeology and anthropology of the Andean region.
Andrew Dufton is a Lecturer in Roman Archaeology and History at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD in Archaeology from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, and previously held a position as a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. His research interrogates the long-term dynamics of urban change in North Africa, from the Iron Age into late antiquity. This work highlights the diversity, haphazardness, and improvisation that best characterise urban life in both ancient and modern contexts. He has excavated and surveyed at sites in the US, the UK, and across the Mediterranean, including acting as surveyor and geospatial data manager at the imperial villa and medieval monastery at Villa Magna (2006–2010); at the Tunisian city of Utica (2011–present); and with Brown University at Petra, Jordan (2012–14).
Links
- Journal of Field Archaeology
- Brown Digital Archaeology Laboratory
- Implementing a Tablet-Based Recording System for Ceramic Classification
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
- Parker VanValkenburgh
- Email: parker_vanvalkenburgh@brown.edu
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Sponsorship Announcement and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Architect Podcast, Episode 133. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we bring on former guests, Parker Van Valkenburg and Andy Duften to talk about big data in archaeology. Let's get to it.
Meet the Guests: Parker Van Valkenburg and Andrew Dufton
00:00:35
Speaker
Peter Van Valkenburg is an archaeologist whose research focuses on landscapes, politics, and environmental change in the early modern world, particularly in late pre-Hispanic and early colonial Peru. He received his PhD in 2012 from Harvard University and previously held positions at the University of Vermont
00:00:51
Speaker
as an assistant professor from 2013 to 15, and Washington University in St. Louis. Among other projects, he is currently the director of a large project that is an investigation of long-term human environmental interaction in Peru's Chachapoyos region. I'm saying that all wrong, and I'm not even attempting the name of the project he's the director of. Sorry, we'll have that in the show notes.
00:01:13
Speaker
But they've got remotely sensed data sets and work with contemporary communities in the provinces of Luya, Chachapoyas, and Bongara, and the Amazonas in Peru. He's also the director of the GeoPacha Geospatial Platform for Indian Culture, History, and Archaeology. At Brown, he directs the Brown Digital Archaeology Laboratory, and we've got that linked in the show notes. And he teaches courses on geographic information systems, cartography, critical digital archaeology of the politics of space and landscape,
00:01:43
Speaker
historical anthropology and the archaeology and anthropology of the Andean region. Now Andrew Dufton is a lecturer in Roman archaeology and history at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD in archaeology from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology in the Ancient World at Brown University and previously held a position as a visiting assistant professor at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. His research interrogates the long-term dynamics of urban change in North Africa,
00:02:11
Speaker
from the Iron Age into late antiquity. This work highlights the diversity, haphazardness, and improvisation that best characterize urban life in both ancient and modern contexts. He has excavated and surveyed its sites in the US, the UK, and across the Mediterranean, including acting as a surveyor and geospatial data manager at the Imperial Villa and Medieval Monastery at Villa Magna, 2006-2010, at the Tunisian city of Utica, 2011 to present.
00:02:38
Speaker
and with Brown University at Petra Jordan, 2012 to 2014. I'll hand it off to myself to get started with the show.
Hosts' Perspectives During the Pandemic
00:02:46
Speaker
All right. Welcome back to the Archea Tech podcast. Paul, how's it going? It's going okay. We're recording on July 14th, I think right now. We're kind of settling into the rhythm of summer and enjoying getting outside and get some sun and still doing the work at the school and all our summer projects, but it's eased up a little bit for the time being. How have you been?
00:03:06
Speaker
Not bad, not bad. It's all fun and games in New York as you guys pull out of the coronavirus, but the rest of the country I think is going right back into it. I'm over in Oregon right now as we're traveling around in our RV. We're actually not traveling, just not to alarm people. We're actually at my parents' house in Oregon. Stayed here for a few weeks now.
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, they just went full mask policy, starting to roll back restaurants and things like that. So luckily we bring our kitchen and all our supplies with us everywhere we go now, so we don't have to worry about too much. I love isolating wherever I can, wherever I want to be. That makes social isolating a lot better is when you can just bring your home with you and go park next to the ocean for a little while. That's pretty nice. And podcast. I'm podcasting from here right now. It's amazing. Let's talk about data though, because that's way more interesting than RVs, isn't it? Big data.
00:03:57
Speaker
That's right. That's right. We just lost our entire audience. No. So let's talk about that.
Ethics in Digital Archaeology
00:04:02
Speaker
So we've got one of our guests today is, uh, Parker van Valkenburg. And he was on another podcast, which we'll listen, we'll link to in the show notes, but Parker, I think you guys were on probably a year ago at this point. I can't even remember when, uh, to talk about some of your research. And then, and then we're also bringing on Andy Dufton, who is working together with Parker. And so, but first, before we get any farther, Parker and Andy, welcome to the show. Thank you.
00:04:18
Speaker
for everybody but you probably.
00:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, we're spread all over the country, too. I know Parker's over on the East Coast. I think I heard him mentioning that, and Andy's over in Scotland, and I'm on the West Coast, and Paul's also on the East Coast, so this call should go smoothly.
00:04:40
Speaker
Nothing can possibly go wrong. We're going to talk to you about a couple of different things here, but one of the things that we were given as a piece of information about you guys was what we're calling this JFA supplement 45. Why don't we start by talking about that? Tell us what JFA 45 is, what you guys did for it, and we'll get into it. Yeah, sure. This is a
00:05:01
Speaker
an open-sourced special issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology, which, you know, incredibly thankful to Christina Luke, the editor there, who made it possible for us to do this open-sourced. And it's based on an essay session that Andy and I co-organized at the last in-person essay is last year. I guess we didn't really have them this year, so it doesn't count. It's the last essay ever, yeah.
00:05:28
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:32
Speaker
The idea of where it started really actually out of some conversations that Andy and I had at Brown University that were right on the back of a previous session he'd organized at the Computer Applications and Archaeology session. So I'll pass the baton to Andy to let you know kind of how that came together. Yes. So there was a session organized in 2017, I guess, at the Computer Applications and Archaeology in Atlanta with my colleague and old coworker when I used to work in London, Jess Ogden, about decollege.
00:06:02
Speaker
digital archaeology. And so it was a series of speakers sort of talking about the, I guess the ethical implications of various aspects of digital archaeology and how we might tweak them or sort of change our practice to understand
00:06:18
Speaker
the ways that digital archaeology is recreating some of the colonial paradigms that we wouldn't necessarily accept in field archaeology. And yet nonetheless, we're sort of accepting unquestioned in some cases in digital archaeological stuff. And there was a lot of dialogue there specifically about remote sensing information. And there was some sort of
00:06:39
Speaker
It's a mild pushback on Twitter about whether we should even be having these conversations at all. And this sort of led to Parker and I having this discussion in person at Brown about how we can sort of continue this dialogue because it's the thing that we felt was super essential, I guess, for archaeologists adopting these technologies.
00:06:55
Speaker
Because you mentioned the phrase digital archaeology and Paul and I talked about this on another show recently about the definition of digital archaeology because I'm in CRM archaeology and to be honest to a lot of CRM archaeologists here in the United States, digital archaeology means using a tablet to record an archaeology site, right? Like taking your paper and turning it into forms. But how are you guys defining digital archaeology in this sense? Because I have a feeling it's a little different.
00:07:21
Speaker
Well, I think one way that I think about it is that all archaeology is digital archaeology to one extent or another. It has been for some time. We all use digital tools. And if we don't pay attention to what the digital tools do to our practice, that doesn't mean we're not digital archaeologists. This means that we're not being particularly introspective about what the tools are doing. You know, one of the things that I've always liked about your podcast and about the sort of growing conversations about
00:07:50
Speaker
digital archaeology. It's an attempt to do what we've always done, which is to critically examine our own methods. I tend to use the term critical digital archaeology, which I know is something that gets used in a number of different circles as being sort of self-consciously, self-critical digital practice that looks at questions about mediation.
00:08:14
Speaker
I love that. And I love that you said that all archeology is digital. I, my God, we've been saying that for a couple of years now, haven't we Paul? Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, and by extension on all archeologists become digital archeologists, there's this sort of feeling that it used to be some sort of specialism. Um, when I did my masters back in 2004, 2005, it sort of felt like you were becoming a specialist in GIS or a specialist in digital archeology, whatever that means. And now it's sort of like everyone is expected to have some.
00:08:43
Speaker
some ability in digital tools. No, that's absolutely true.
00:08:48
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the nice thing about doing shows like this too and bringing you guys on because we like to highlight the possibilities out there and what people can do because I don't think they realize how important thinking about big data and the approach to big data for your project. It has to be a conversation that you have no matter what you're doing because we are recording, even in the smallest sense of a site, for example, we're recording an amazing amount of data with those sites. And the more tools that come down the line, the more we're recording
00:09:18
Speaker
And the more we need to think about, well, how are we going to not only just fundamentally store this data, where is that going to happen? But then what are we going to do to it? And what can we do to it? And what can we do with it in the future? So I think that's one of the ways we're going to go in this podcast right now, for sure. So there's one thing in the JFA collection that
Big Data's Role in Archaeology
00:09:39
Speaker
we put together. There are a couple of archaeologists who I thought brought a healthy skepticism
00:09:46
Speaker
with the concept of big data. The point was merely to say, as you did, Chris, that archaeologists have kind of always dealt with big data. We've always dealt with
00:09:55
Speaker
challenging amounts of information and had to think about how we synthesize it, how we store it, and so on and so forth. Some people think, archaeology has always already been big in one way or another. That's one thing we have to reckon with is, is there anything really fundamentally new about the insights that are generated through data science approaches, or are these just old problems wrapped up to look new, or are there
00:10:23
Speaker
Maybe some fundamentally new things that we can do now, now that we can address problems at scale that were difficult to tackle when it wasn't possible to aggregate data at the level that we can now. I'm actually curious about that use of the word big data.
00:10:41
Speaker
In popular parlance, we use it in the news, we use it in talking about data science and so on. It's really dealing with vast quantities of data scale that is world-spanning millions, billions of data points.
00:11:00
Speaker
And in the introduction to that JFA supplement, you use the term big data, but you use it in a slightly different way. You say that's not necessarily the sheer scale, but it more emphasizes those analytical approaches. Could you expand on that for our listeners? I think if you looked at someone who's actually a data scientist outside of archaeology and said, look at my big data, I have this aerial imagery. I mean, they probably laugh, right? Because it
00:11:27
Speaker
It's big for archaeology, and it's still massive in terms of its size, in terms of the file storage, in terms of the questions we can be asking. But as you say, it's not really big data in the sense that a lot of external data scientists would necessarily conceive of big data, things that are spanning the world, or they're talking about millions and millions and millions of data points. So there is that tension between archaeologists thinking, on the one hand, our data has always been big, but on the other hand, our data isn't
00:11:57
Speaker
isn't that big. And so I guess it's sort of thinking about the fact that whether or not we're hitting the threshold, whatever we want the definition of big data to be, whether a data scientist would think about whether we need these sort of parallel processing capabilities to deal with our data or not. These types of things weren't really the point of the session or also the JFA supplement that came out of the session. It was more about for the context of archaeology, these are big
00:12:23
Speaker
data sets or data sets that require perhaps a change in the way that we're thinking or sort of a paradigmatic shift of how we're thinking about landscapes particularly, but also how we're thinking about questions of ownership, questions of interaction between local communities. These types of questions are emerging. So sort of trying to avoid spending all of the entire session and also the entire supplement trying to define this sort of amorphous thing of big data and acknowledge it. What's big for archaeology isn't necessarily
00:12:53
Speaker
huge, but it's still changing the way that we're thinking about our practices, the ways that we can understand or sort of see archaeological landscapes. Yeah, sure. I mean, I couldn't agree more. The sense that what big data
00:13:08
Speaker
We did really want to sort of avoid the question of slapping a label on what was big and what was medium sized and so on and so forth and focus really on what are people actually doing with this stuff and what are some sort of new
00:13:24
Speaker
interpretive and ethical problems that are coming out of work that may not yet be fully taking advantage of what data science approaches can bring to archaeology, but are still pushing us in new directions. My sense is that initiatives like TDAR and Open Context are trying to get us to the point where archaeologists can make use of the kind of most robust approaches of data science.
00:13:51
Speaker
we're dealing with, you know, there's some basic problems of aggregation that we still deal with that you don't face, say, I don't know, when you're dealing with databases of DNA, where there's a kind of built-in modularity to it. Everybody calls
00:14:06
Speaker
a certain molecule, the same thing, but we may disagree about what a pot, sure it is. And therefore we code it differently. Yeah, that that's
Case Study: Resettlement in Colonial Peru
00:14:14
Speaker
a problem. And I would sell for sure is, is calling things, everything's we've had interviews with, uh, you know, Eric, uh, Kanza before too, from open context about
00:14:23
Speaker
how they handle data as well. It's always a big issue. One of the things you mentioned though in the article that I wanted to get at here, and you were just just alluding to this, is what kinds of things we can do with the data. And one particular example I can think of here in, well, not here, but when I'm in Nevada working, is an archeological site consists of two artifacts or features or a combination of the two in 30 meter radius of each other.
00:14:48
Speaker
So keeping that in mind, if you have one flake, for example, one prehistoric flake, a lithic, and it's just hanging out there, that's recorded as an isolate. And an isolate in and of itself doesn't really tell you a whole lot of information. But when you record an isolate every couple of hundred meters over this 10,000 square miles, that might tell you a little bit more information about what's going on there. But
00:15:07
Speaker
What kinds of questions have you guys identified that can be answered from these big data approaches that you just really can't answer any other way? Something similar to that. Is there anything you guys have identified? Because I know you mentioned that in the beginning of this article. And then maybe what problems are associated with that as well, but we can get to that later.
00:15:26
Speaker
One approach or one question that is close to home is the subject of a paper in this JFA themed issue written by Steve Wernke, myself and our colleague Akita Saito. And Steve and I both are interested in the forced resettlement of indigenous people in colonial Peru. Around 1572, this particular vice president Francisco de Toledo tried to move
00:15:54
Speaker
What we think was between 1.5 and 2 million native Peruvians into planned towns called Greluciones. Steve's work and my work have focused on examining what the kind of local consequences of this process were in a couple of different valleys in Peru, but we haven't really understood
00:16:17
Speaker
how this phenomenon took shape globally and what some of the major differences in regional articulations of the program were. And so what Steve did beginning
00:16:29
Speaker
really three or four years ago now, is to begin to design two digital tools that would enable us to aggregate information about this phenomenon, the general resettlement of native people in Peru, also known as the Roloxo and Heneral. And it turns out that there's this census that was taken around the same time of the resettlement. It's partial, it's problematic, it's a colonial document, but there's a bunch of information in there about the names of specific planned towns, how many people lived in them, and so on and so forth.
00:16:58
Speaker
So Steve had his research assistants painstakingly go through and locate as many of these towns as they could. And lo and behold, although again, this is not a data set that somebody working in data science and industry would think is all that big, we had the locations of 800 towns. And then we said, you know, what would be really interesting is let's take a look at the relationship between these towns and where we know the existing Inka Road system was located.
00:17:26
Speaker
And the Peruvian government, through an initiative called the Proyecto Capac Nian, has been trying to map the entirety of the Inka Road system. So we threw that into our GIS. We threw in these points that represent the locations of these 800 plus sites of forestry settlement. And then compared the location of the points to the road to the location of 800 plus randomly placed points.
00:17:54
Speaker
And sure enough, there's a significant spatial association between the locations of these colonial planned towns in the Inca Road system. And what we think that shows at scale is that the Inca Road system was really kind of the circulatory system that also fed the Inca Empire. When the Spanish moved into Peru, they used existing infrastructure as really the host that they colonized. And the association, I mean, you could show this at
00:18:23
Speaker
the scale of an individual valley, but the pattern wouldn't be all that convincing. It's at the scale of the entire empire that it becomes a really salient and interesting phenomenon. And it's those types of questions that have to do with these massive political machines like the Inca empire that I think these, quote unquote, big data approaches oftentimes hold the most promise for solving. Well, on that note, before we discuss the issues with big data and things that can go wrong,
00:18:49
Speaker
Maybe we shouldn't be analyzing. I don't know. We'll talk about that. But let's take our first break and then come back on the other side and continue this discussion with Parker and Andy back in a second. Chris Webster here for the Archeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R.
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00:20:23
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the Architect Podcast, episode 133. Today we're talking with Parker van Valkenburg and Andrew Duffton. We're discussing issues around big data, things that they were looking at closely in a recent JFA volume 45 supplement one that came out earlier this year in 2020. We were discussing big data just before the break and some of the benefits of it, some of the things you can do it. And I think Andy, you had some things that you wanted to chime in about what some of the potential problems or pitfalls are with it.
00:20:50
Speaker
Yeah, I guess if we're thinking about the possibilities that Parker sort of hinting at, that a lot of the contributions of the volume talk about this ability to ask questions at scales that we wouldn't otherwise really be able to
00:21:02
Speaker
to even fathom, to think about asking questions of the entirety of the Inca empire is sort of crazy. However, there's sort of this downside. A lot of our contributors to the JFA supplemental sort of bring up this question of as we're moving to larger and larger scales, are we becoming more and more detached from
00:21:21
Speaker
the communities where archaeological field work is traditionally taking place. And so when we sort of move towards, we had a contribution that didn't end up publishing with us, but a contribution to the session from the Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa project, which is this massive project that's doing recording of heritage at risk across all of the Middle East and North Africa. And there's a sort of question of as we're doing these kind of top down satellite level
00:21:47
Speaker
imagery recording, what are we losing? The concern that's raised by a number of people is that we're losing this idea of the relationships with local community members.
Community Relationships in Archaeology
00:21:57
Speaker
We're losing the understanding, sort of an embedded knowledge of what archaeological landscapes are like. These are things that
00:22:03
Speaker
that aren't only possible to be represented from satellite imagery. They're represented through engagement with the landscape, through engagement with the people. One of the contributions in the supplemental by Alison Mickle tackles this question specifically of proximity. And as we sort of take these wider macro scale views of what's going on, we're potentially losing that engagement with the proximity to the archaeological landscape, the proximity to the past.
00:22:31
Speaker
And so that's sort of a question that raises a number of questions of interpretation, but it also raises a number of questions of ethics because it sort of moves the archaeologists sort of towards this idea of surveillance and mapping of heritage sites, of creating these sort of gazetteers of sites over massive areas that we then use in our largely Western universities to analyze things, to publish things, to get jobs, to be promoted.
00:22:56
Speaker
And as we go to this macro scale, are we sort of becoming more and more removed from the people that have a daily interaction with this heritage? And so it sort of raises these ethical questions of surveillance, of mapping of military satellite technology, of all of these types of things that we kind of wanted in the session and we're pleased that the supplemental also addresses how these technologies are also sort of raising these problems or these questions that we need to be aware of if we're going to adopt the wholesale.
00:23:23
Speaker
I like that line of questioning, which is definitely highlighted in the intro article to the supplement, is not just concerned with the practical effects, which it certainly is, but also, as you said, the ethical implications of it. Certainly people have talked about ethics and archaeology for a while, but it feels to me that we're at a point in our field right now that just like digital and archaeology
00:23:49
Speaker
really shouldn't be a separate thing, digital archaeology versus archaeology in general. Ethics in archaeology is becoming more and more foregrounded and an acceptable part of the discussion. Why are we doing things? How are we doing things? How does that benefit the local community or harm the local community? How does it affect our view of the world? And since we're looking at primarily through these big data, we're looking at landscapes
00:24:14
Speaker
From this God's eye view, this kind of air war view, I like that you were explicitly bringing the discussion back down onto the ground. How does it work with local communities, with local understandings of the environment, and how does it benefit or harm them? Was there a particular example from the supplement that you thought really highlighted that nicely?
00:24:34
Speaker
No, I mean, our main contribution that was talking about this sort of tension was the endangered archaeology project, but then they were unable because it's a massive project multiple teams across different universities to contribute to the supplemental. They were at the SAA session, but didn't really.
00:24:50
Speaker
submit. I guess the Allison Mikkel contribution yeah about the I forget what it's called specifically about the the proximity of local communities to big data it's sort of really questioning this this element of what is a satellite image to people who live
00:25:05
Speaker
at an archaeological site or people that are living day to day in archaeological landscapes because that's their lived experience. Do they care about these ideas of macro scale understandings of connections between sites or wide scale landscapes? And do we need to try to include her question, which I completely sort of agree is a question we need to be asking is, is it even worthwhile to try to include these types of hyper local embedded proximate understandings of landscape?
00:25:34
Speaker
into these big data initiatives. Is that a thing we should be trying to consider or is it just too different for us to even really try and embed them?
00:25:42
Speaker
I can only imagine that trying to embed them is an extremely tricky proposition, but at least the recognition that these are both valid ways of looking at our data sets and the people that they affect at least can start a discussion, which I think is what you were trying to do.
Open Data and Indigenous Archaeology Ethics
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. The intent was never to create any kind of final word on these questions, either in the session or the supplemental that emerged from it, as much as
00:26:08
Speaker
I personally, I don't, Parker can agree or disagree. He agrees. We'll see. Um, but I personally feel like there's a tendency in, in digital technologies to sort of adopt things whole scale without necessarily always asking the same ethical questions that we've come to ask, um, other types of field work. And so it's, it's assumed.
00:26:29
Speaker
in fieldwork situations that you need to have some sort of feedback or interaction or connection to the local communities of the places you work. That's an ethical imperative to what you're doing. And I don't know that there's the same ethical imperative when you're just talking about mapping sites from Google Earth. And I think there should be a question asked of, if we're just mapping sites from Google Earth, what is the ethical imperative? How do we make it so we're not just surveilling people
00:26:56
Speaker
outside of their homes and judging how they're interacting with their own surroundings for our own sort of heritage or whatever purposes, archaeological purposes. I was really struck when I took a class in graduate school with Chris Matthews, the historical archaeologist, and he put up a picture of Edmund Hillary and asked the class
00:27:18
Speaker
why archaeology matters and he gave us an answer that echoed Hillary because it's there and what he meant is that it happens somewhere. What's powerful about archaeology is that you can point to the ground and say this is where this happened and here is a piece of the past and we can be here together and we can
00:27:38
Speaker
We can have a difficult conversation about it, and you're held to ethical standards that you're not when you're working at a distance. So, I mean, what Annie's talking about is when you're disembedded from that standard context in which archaeology is done, and it feels like you have the luxury of not examining ethical questions.
00:28:00
Speaker
You're still in place somewhere. There is no such thing as a God's eye view. The God's eye view is a place, you know, is produced through very specific technologies that are controlled from really specific rooms that are run by people who have guns.
00:28:18
Speaker
And so one of the things we try to do in that article is to draw on some feminist literature and science and technology studies that sort of says, let's actually try to put people back in place. It's a challenging thing to do when you're working with satellite imagery, but I think we can get part of the way there by being honest about where the data come from and then trying to explore
00:28:44
Speaker
what happens when we put our interpretations out in the world, particularly without asking for localized consent? We're talking, I mean, primarily in this conversation about satellite imagery, but it wasn't even other aspects that emerge in the supplemental or that other things that we sort of unequivocally see as being good for archaeology, like open data or the accessibility of these archaeological data sets can have the same sort of ethical implications that we don't
00:29:13
Speaker
necessarily think of when we're sort of first sort of pushing for this type of open data. So one of the contributions by Mahalo Gupta and colleagues looks at the fact that in questions of Indigenous archaeology in Canada, their case studies base, the pressure to put archaeological data in these open access databases at the provincial level or the federal level can sometimes run completely contrary to the wishes of
00:29:39
Speaker
the First Nations people whose heritage it actually is, right? And so there's the tendency to sort of see open data as good, accessible, everyone can have it.
00:29:48
Speaker
everyone gets it, you know, everyone can use it, it's shared heritage. But even these things that seem to be unequivocally good still have these underlying ethical questions that need to sort of be tackled. So it's not just about the aerial photography where we're bringing this stuff up, but it's sort of a number of these different themes are cross cutting across the supplemental, where we need to really assess the greater good of these things.
00:30:10
Speaker
There is also, within computer science, there's a whole question now of the ethical considerations of open source. There's been a big brouhaha around GitHub and Microsoft with things that have been used, open source projects have been used by ICE and the military against the intended wishes of the original authors. These kinds of
00:30:33
Speaker
unexpected consequences that we have with something that we tend to see from our privileged position as being good, open source, open access. Sometimes when you scratch the surface, have effects on other people in ways that we didn't originally intend or ever hoped for. Well, open access doesn't mean that equal access, right? So this idea that, oh, everyone can see Google Earth. Well, it doesn't mean everyone does see Google Earth, right? Or everyone uses it the same way. And so just because it can be downloaded doesn't
00:31:03
Speaker
I think it's sort of a cop-out. And the same thing for open access. Just because it's open access doesn't mean that it's not controlled by a very certain paradigm of data and structure and openness and a very certain value system that doesn't necessarily represent the indigenous value system.
00:31:21
Speaker
I thought the point made earlier about the data sets coming from a particular location. That also rung true with me because mapping work I've done in the Middle East all started with French cadastral maps in Syria, so colonial power.
00:31:38
Speaker
British landscape maps in South Yemen, and so that's also another colonial power. Hell, even the GPS that we use is originally a military technology. We're all comfortable on some level until I guess we start scratching the surface and wonder what the ethical considerations are then of these data sets.
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, mapping for me, the French colonial North Africa, same thing where my fieldwork is, it's entirely a colonial exercise, the original mapping of these heritage sites. Yeah, and I think, I mean, this is something that we wrangle with. There's been a tendency, you know, the obvious polar opposite response to technological utopianism is to be dystopian about it and to be really highly skeptical and say,
00:32:26
Speaker
Anytime you're using these technologies in one way or another, you're reinforcing these forms of vision that have historically been really violent. But I think there's some interesting ways in which people use these forms of vision. They turn them back on the apparatuses that build them. There was this great exhibit on campus here called Drone Warriors that was about the use of drones at Standing Rock. Really fascinating engagement with this question of how drones can be used by people who traditionally don't have access to power.
00:32:54
Speaker
I think that clearly the kind of scholarship that we have in this issue isn't sort of the epitome of that example. We do try to get at questions about how
00:33:03
Speaker
some patterns may emerge through the application of big data approaches that push back against the dominant power structures that enabled some of this data to be built. So I think we do have to be careful. Bill Rankin says this in his book After the Map, which deals with the development of GPS in the last couple of chapters. He sort of says it's true that
00:33:29
Speaker
The GPS is this military technology, but it's not necessarily baked into it. And there are all sorts of ways in which GPS has unexpected impacts on people's experiences of space. They don't necessarily follow from its initial applications. So back to the idea of big data, Parker, you're using what you're term in big data to look at at colonial impacts on the indigenous population in Peru.
Colonial Roots and Big Data
00:33:59
Speaker
Last year, we had an interview with, I believe it was Zach Bayer, who's talking about using British documents in a big data sense to look at the slave trade across the Atlantic and through the Caribbean.
00:34:18
Speaker
I'm not really very well thought through question, but how much of the big data approach do we have? Is it going to be rooted in colonial exploitation and impacts on the rest of the world? Is that the way that a lot of this big data studies are going to be going in the near future?
00:34:42
Speaker
is the question that are big data in a sense headed towards a collision? Is this colonialism wrapped up in new clothing to some extent? To some extent, but I also mean is the most easily accessible kinds of big data, stuff that is generated from the European colonialism of the last few centuries?
00:35:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great point. The example I drew on was a form of colonial big data that was collected specifically to understand how to exploit indigenous bodies for Spanish material benefit. And you mentioned this in your discussion before maps came from, they have this, at least the sort of Western mapping tradition has empire and colonialism written all over it. So I think there's a question here that comes up with
00:35:34
Speaker
how we use colonial archives. Anne Stoller and Fred Cooper wrote about this back in the 1990s. How do you have to read sources like this critically so that what you're doing is something different than simply putting 16th century colonial knowledge in a GIS and re-projecting it, or basically streaming it out of a loudspeaker?
00:35:58
Speaker
Um, and, uh, I mean, in our own project that hadn't mostly to do with trying to combine it with things that the Spanish never thought to combine it with, namely the path of the Inca road system and the kinds of local localized knowledge that you only really get if you do.
00:36:12
Speaker
emplaced archaeology that engages with local people. So I mean, in some ways, I think that that is, that's where we're headed. How do we use these sources critically, but also how do we combine big data, eye in the sky approaches in archaeology with on the ground meat, potatoes, dirt and trowel archaeology. And sometimes that's what we see is that the big data approaches aren't providing answers. They're, they're simply
00:36:39
Speaker
enabling us to ask some new questions that then require us to go back to the field to answer them. That's a hopeful view of it, I think. I like that. I hope. We don't want to be entirely pessimistic. I think Andy's more a realist than I am. Would you say that, Andy? I think that's probably fair. I can be jaded and real. That's fine.
00:37:04
Speaker
Well, I think with that final hopeful note, it's a good one to end on. So thank you, Parker and Andy, for coming on the show and talking about this. And we will have links to this supplement, this issue supplement. So it's really cool because we've got the one link that we were sent that takes you right to all the papers that were associated with this. So pretty good. Plus we'll have a few other links on there, including the episode that Parker was on last year, if you want to go check that out.
00:37:31
Speaker
Again, thanks guys for coming on. Thanks for talking about big data with us. And I hope we can have the conversation at some point like we did in the beginning about digital archaeology and Parker saying kind of all archaeology is digital, digital archaeology. Seems like we're kind of getting to the point where all archaeology is big archaeology as well, because we're just collecting a lot more data, even with smaller sites. So maybe that conversation is starting to merge a little bit.
00:37:54
Speaker
Great idea. No, indeed. All right, guys. Again, thanks for coming on. Yeah. Thank you so much for having us and take care. Be safe. You too. Will do.
00:38:10
Speaker
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00:38:29
Speaker
All right, welcome back to the Archaeotech podcast, episode 133. Paul, that was a great discussion and I really liked how I was going to mention the thing about all archaeology bringing big archaeology and they started to wrap that up for me right at the end there. I'm great that we bookended it by saying, all archaeology is digital archaeology, but really, I do really think that all archaeology is big archaeology these days just because of the sheer volume of data people are recording.
00:38:57
Speaker
We've always recorded a lot of data with archaeology, but it's even more so now. I even think about just photographs. To take a simple example, even 15 years ago, you would limit your number of photographs that you take because you're using film. You've got a finite resource and you only have so much that you can take out with you and development costs, just add to your project costs, things like that.
00:39:20
Speaker
man, what's digital really started to hit? I mean, people are just snapping photos all over the place because what's the big deal? Let's take 300 photos because we can, not realizing that we're probably going to store all those in a hard drive somewhere forever. Where does that go? What do we do with that? That's just one minor example of the data we're collecting, but as tools, especially for CRM archaeologists, get more affordable,
00:39:43
Speaker
and drones become more of a thing and other types of data collection methods become more accessible, people are going to start using them more. And we have to be concerned with how we're using the data and what we're doing with it. Well, that concern there, you and I, for the most part, when we talk about concern, we talk about practical concerns, storage, how things are actually manipulated and used in our computers, in our databases,
00:40:11
Speaker
you know, image processing in GIS and so on. We're concerned about that kind of how, but there's also the whole concern that was definitely brought up in this article, in this supplement rather, that's the concern for the ethics behind what we're doing. And I'd said it because I see it day in and day out on my Twitter feeds and on my various Discord channels I'm on with different archaeologists that
00:40:37
Speaker
Maybe it's mostly people younger than I am. Maybe I hope that it's including my generation. But thinking about the ethical concerns and the impacts upon descended communities and the impacts upon people who live on the land that you're studying and various stakeholders and shareholders, this is all now part of the normal conversation.
Digital Transition in Archaeology
00:40:55
Speaker
It's not a side fringe thing. In the same way, and this is something that Parker led off, that digital archaeology, well, basically all archaeology is digital archaeology at this point.
00:41:05
Speaker
And I think that is now so obvious. The people outside of our field even get that, are starting to get that. And so I want to actually, I got a great email a couple weeks back from one of our listeners, Mark Carrera, who's not an archeologist. Maybe he listens to this because he's like me spent a couple decades working in K through 12 technology. He's an IT guy in school. So we probably have a lot of some pot to go there.
00:41:34
Speaker
But he wrote a very nice email and gave me permission to quote something that he said with regards to digital archaeology. And I think that he says it better than I could have. He says, quote, We live in a digital world inhabited by digital natives. I think that the adjective digital is past its prime and should be dropped. Field research is field research. Eventually, it will become digital data. All of it. Why call it digital archaeology?
00:41:58
Speaker
And I think that really cuts to the point that we've been thinking of for a while, that we are using digital tools to generate digital data and we just, that is, it's our data. Who cares? The digital is pointless almost at this point. And as you were implying, now we have so much of it because it's so easy and fairly inexpensive to get more and more data that soon all our
00:42:25
Speaker
digital archaeological data is going to be big data and hopefully it's all underpinned by an ethical consideration before we just go willy-nilly collecting and processing and disseminating.
00:42:40
Speaker
Yeah. And that's the point. That's the point I think we've been trying to make for a while now, honestly, which is, man, why, why are we having this discussion over, you know, terminology when it's, when it's all coming down to the same thing? I do think the one caveat to all that just because
00:42:57
Speaker
there are different considerations are some of the ethical considerations that were brought up in this show because it's not something I really thought about. I'm kind of a data guy when it comes down to it and I like the science of it and looking at it and sometimes I don't pay attention to those bigger concerns. I think one of the things they were mentioning is how do some of the people who's
00:43:17
Speaker
ancestral relationships in history that you're trying to analyze, how do they feel about you taking these massive datasets and generalizing across a large landform? That's bad. It's basically stereotyping. If we're trying to generalize across a landform based on certain things, we might not be getting the whole picture. We got to think, well, what question are we trying to ask? My example of
00:43:40
Speaker
you know, the one flake hanging out on the landscape in Nevada. Well, there's 10 million of those, right? And if we can map all those, maybe we can answer some bigger questions, but you know what? Maybe we can't because maybe all of those cultures have that same practice because let's be honest, it's a flake. You retouch as you're walking along, you do different things. You're going to drop a flake here and there. Maybe the flake was transported by somebody's shoe or a cow hoof or something like that. I mean, you don't know how it got there.
00:44:07
Speaker
and you probably can't answer a big generalizing question other than the fact that were people here? Yes, no.
00:44:15
Speaker
They were because Flick exists. But other than that, you really can't make any cultural determinations because there were so many different cultural groups lumped into small areas. Because as we mentioned in Peru, before we even started talking, we were talking about Peru because Parker's done work down there. It's all valleys. Nevada is all valleys. You could have one Paiute cultural group in one valley and a completely different one in another valley, and they'd have a little communication between each other culturally.
00:44:44
Speaker
Those are the big concerns we got to be concerned with, I think, and that's something that I haven't really thought about that much, to be honest. No, I haven't thought about that deeply, but I have thought a lot about your example of the density of sherds or whatever in the legal ramifications of it.
00:45:02
Speaker
Any of us that were doing our dissertation research in the late 90s, early 2000s, one of the big questions was, how do you define a site? People generally went with certain densities. I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that site is a pretty useless notion.
00:45:21
Speaker
What I mean by that is that in my own work, I'd come across a roadway. Well, a roadway doesn't necessarily have a particular density. It's a linear feature that is definitely man-made on landscape. Is that a site? Well, it probably should be considered a site, but then with the shared scatters and lithic scatters and such,
00:45:45
Speaker
It used to be that below a certain threshold, it was to use the same analogy that you're using with your digital photography versus film photography. It was a limited resource. Now, it's pretty easy to just put a note, GPS point, whatever, you put it into your digital notebook.
00:46:03
Speaker
and move on and then eventually dump that all into a GIS. And so I think that's where it starts to come back around to your notion of all our archeological data, our big data potentially, is that if we make it so easy to collect these things, these data, why don't we? And we probably do barring certain legal considerations and to bring it all back around, hopefully we have an ethical understanding of what and why we're doing it.
00:46:31
Speaker
Yes, we certainly can record everything, but like you're saying, it might not mean anything or it might reveal something that probably shouldn't be revealed. And no, I don't mean the mummy's curse. Wow, you went there. Nice.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, there's, there's so much to talk about this. Um, I would say definitely get ahold of us. Like, like our last email commenter did the one that you just quoted, get ahold of us and, and let us know what your thoughts is on this because it'll help us, uh, help us frame the conversation, maybe find other guests and.
00:47:06
Speaker
and see what we're going to talk about next. But I wonder where this podcast would be in five years, you know what I mean? Or even a couple of years for that matter. What are we going to be talking about? We're talking about big data a lot. Like big data has come up numerous times as not only a side topic of a show, but as a primary topic of a show like this one. And, you know, similar to digital archaeology, I mean, I can remember
00:47:30
Speaker
When you first came on the show, Paul, and before that, it was all talk about tablets and what kind of tablets should we use for archaeology and different programs and things like that. And that's not even a question anymore. And that's a real short period of time where that's not a question. Now, CRM archaeologists are still a little bit behind the curve on actually implementing some of that stuff, but more and more firms are coming into the idea that they really should be recording digitally, not just because it's 2020, but because
00:47:57
Speaker
it's just more efficient that way and you're able to do more things with the data if it's more in digital versus becomes digital later on. So yeah, it's interesting to think about where we're going to be in the future with all this.
Future of Digital and Big Data in Archaeology
00:48:09
Speaker
So any other final thoughts on big data, Paul? So let's wrap up big data forever. Yeah. Wash your hands. That, I mean, that really is big data right there. Let's, let's talk about the coronavirus. Anyway. Yeah.
00:48:26
Speaker
So anyway, that was great. Thanks again to Parker and Andy for coming on. We've got a bunch of links to their resources and things like that over in the show notes, arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech forward slash one 33. And I would say, Hey, check out our show notes as well. If you want to get ahold of us, all the nice contact info is in there.
00:48:47
Speaker
Again, arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech. Also, I want to mention on this show, we have as long as you're listening to this in somewhat real time because things may have changed in the future, but we've changed our whole membership system. We've taken it from a three-tiered membership system down to just one tier and it's $7.99 a month and you get access to episodes early without the ads. You get access to our Slack team where you can talk to the hosts, you can talk to other members,
00:49:13
Speaker
and a few other freebies thrown in there. We're coming down the line again, if you're listening to this in real time in July of 2020, we are coming around with some live discussions and other things that you'll get as a member. For example, we're going to continue running these small conferences like we did our test conference in May, in which Paul was the speaker. We have
00:49:34
Speaker
more of those coming down the line. And not that we're going to charge necessarily for attendance, but we do want to charge for the access to the recorded versions of those presentations, just so we can make some money for the podcast network, keep the lights on over here, get our volunteers paid.
00:49:49
Speaker
and continue doing those things. But I'm saying that because members will always have free access to that stuff. So if you're a member of the APN, that's a pretty sweet deal is you'll get access to those back conference catalogs that we'll end up doing later. So, so head on over to arcpaudit.com forward slash members or just see our CalG podcast network and you'll see links to it and check it out. So I think that's about it for big data. Hey Paul. Yeah. Yeah. This will never come up again. We've exhausted the topic.
00:50:17
Speaker
Indeed. So with that, we'll end the show. And again, contact us if you want to go become a member. Contact us about advertising as well. Help us keep the lights on over here and support archeological education and outreach. We'll see you next time. Bye. I mean, you have to end with wash your hands, even though you already said it. Okay. Wash your hands.
00:50:43
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:51:08
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:51:30
Speaker
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