Introduction
Writing about the representation of prehistoric humans, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez (Reference Gifford-Gonzalez1993: 26) states that artists are mining arcane knowledge to make simulacra or ‘science fictions’ of archaeological evidence. The overt implication of this is that we are making fanciful, unreal representations of past things, people, and places when producing archaeological interpretations. Yet Gifford-Gonzalez is riffing on Donna Haraway (Reference Haraway1989: 3), who notes that ‘both science and popular culture are intricately woven of fact and fiction’—which share the same Latin root, facere, to make. Facts, Haraway states, are descendants of the past participle (factum), done, unchanging, ‘fit only to be recorded’—as in artefacts—whereas ‘fiction is an active form, referring to a present act of fashioning’ (Haraway, Reference Haraway1989: 4) as in the act of interpretation, of storytelling. Following Gifford-Gonzalez and Haraway, I am not stating that archaeological interpretation is not true, but that it has the immense potential to be true, to resonate with all the passion and fire of science fiction novels, movies, or comic books. I posit that science fictions allow the past and present to become permeable through the creation of a shared interstitial space. Prefiguring archaeological interpretations as ‘science fiction’ is liberating but also demanding. Our present acts of fashioning fall far short of expanding the understanding of humans in compelling and potentially disturbing ways. Haraway elaborates on Marilyn Strathern: ‘It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with)’ (Strathern, Reference Strathern1988, 12 in Haraway, Reference Haraway2016). This article is an experiment in trying out different ways to think with digital archaeology, to acknowledge our science fictions, to disturb our genre. To make trouble.
The digital has become pervasive, tedious, and worryingly invisible in archaeological labour, embedded in the craft of archaeological knowledge production. Digital work in archaeology is so ubiquitous that it has recently led Huvila to state: ‘there is no digital archaeology’ (Huvila, Reference Huvila2018: 1). This may be true. While this article focuses on digital archaeology, much of the argument can be applied more broadly, to most acts of archaeological interpretation. On the surface, digital archaeology is defined by the tools and methods employed in the investigation and interpretive display of the past. This can foster a sense of remove from the processes embedded in the use of digital technologies; non-reflexive use of digital interpretive media in archaeology has been increasingly criticized in recent literature (Frankland, Reference Frankland, Chrysanthi, Murrieta Flores and Papadopoulos2012; Perry, Reference Perry, Chapman and Wylie2014; Jeffrey, Reference Jeffrey2015; Huggett, Reference Huggett2017; Morgan & Wright, Reference Morgan and Wright2018). Whereas many seek to seamlessly embed digital technologies into everyday archaeological methodologies, archaeologists should cultivate an alternative, posthuman feminist practice that dives into the uncanny valley, highlights chronological disruptions, that queers and interferes with our understanding of ourselves and the past.
Posthumanism has been lauded and digested by other disciplines, decades ago, but the patina of rust on the cyborg is, in my estimation, ready for archaeological investigation. Hayles (Reference Hayles1999: 2–3) characterizes posthumanist thought as disembodied, an amalgamated material-informational entity with shifting boundaries, aching towards a seamless articulation with artificial intelligence. She then recontextualizes posthumanism as understanding human life as ‘embedded in a material world of great complexity’, deeply embodied and removed from liberal humanism and anti-human conceptualizations of the self (Hayles, Reference Hayles1999: 287). This is a political, grounded, embodied engagement with technology. Similarly, Haraway's ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (Reference Haraway1985) is an explicitly political call to attend to socialist feminism and materialism within digital ecologies. Braidotti extensively and productively elaborates on the posthuman, combining Foucauldian genealogies with feminist politics to examine entangled power relations and ‘produce grounded and complex cartographies of the posthuman condition’ (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti, Banerji and Paranjape2016: 15–16; also Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2013).
Within archaeology, feminist posthumanism has been described by Christina Fredengren (Reference Fredengren2013: 55) as questioning anthropocentrism, using embodied subject positions to address power, ethics, and accountability, and encompassing the full range of human experience to work for a more sustainable future. Fredengren constructs a compelling case that feminist posthumanism ‘can alter the arguments about identity, personhood and subjectivity and, thereby, make room for an increased interchange between science and the humanities in archaeology’ (Fredengren, Reference Fredengren2013: 66). She further argues for the importance of posthumanist approaches in heritage to emphasize how ‘agents can be mobilized in productive ways as well as how heritage resources could be used to de-colonize, learn and unlearn, entangle and detangle practices’ (Fredengren, Reference Fredengren2015: 127). While arguments regarding object-oriented-ontologies and symmetrical archaeology have received more attention, Fredengren's mobilization of feminist posthumanism to create a holistic approach to archaeological interpretation is key for digital archaeologists who actively engage in a cyborg practice of integrating human and non-human elements into their media. So, it was perhaps a misstep, when Stuart Eve and I (Morgan & Eve, Reference Morgan and Eve2012) wrote, ‘we are all digital archaeologists’—an easy strapline to cite, diminish, and move on from—when the suggestion of a cyborg archaeology may have encouraged engagement with our intent: an embodied, political, activist digital archaeology.
A Cyborg Archaeology
I argue that there is deep creative potential in aligning with a cyborg archaeology. A cyborg archaeology draws from feminist posthumanism to transgress bounded constructions of past people as well as our current selves. By using embodied technologies, we can push interpretation in archaeology beyond traditional, skeuomorphic reproductions of previous methods (as discussed in Morgan & Wright, Reference Morgan and Wright2018) to highlight ruptures in thought and practice. One of the most powerful potentials within a cyborg archaeology is the ability to make a viable interstitial space where material expression from the past and present can co-mingle in commensurate space (Figure 1). A cyborg archaeology is a practice in worlding, in Heidegger's (Reference Heidegger, Schmidt and Stambaugh2010) sense of being-in-the-world, but also as world-building in science fiction and video game creation. From this stance, creating archaeological interpretations is endlessly immersive, a process that I have compared to telepresence, ‘where you are when you are talking on the phone’ (Rucker et al., Reference Rucker, Sirius and Queen Mu1992). While immersed in archaeological interpretation, you are not completely in the present, but also not wholly in the past, but inhabit an interstitial space (Morgan, Reference Morgan2009, Reference Morgan2012). This resonates with Fredengren's (Reference Fredengren2013: 59) use of the concept of the transcorporeal to understand the blurred boundaries between the human body, places, and things.
Figure 1. Cyborg archaeology.
A cyborg archaeology acknowledges that our bodies are dividual, ‘weedy and promiscuous’ (Haraway, Reference Haraway1991, Reference Haraway and Hables-Gray1995), and the perceived boundaries between machines and humans, nature and culture, and the present and past are inevitably permeable. Virtual and augmented reality can provide a meeting ground where digital materiality defines all subjects, thus allowing transgression of these perceived boundaries. A cyborg archaeology integrates the body, the author of the interpretation. As Hayles notes, ‘we do not leave our history behind but rather, like snails, carry it around with us in the sedimented and enculturated instantiations of our pasts we call our bodies’ (Hayles, Reference Hayles2003: 137). Yet the body is only one component of the holistic interpretation. A cyborg archaeology weaves together ontologies of humans, animals, and things, bioarchaeologies investigating ancient gut flora, and digital flows and transformations. By contrast, a digital archaeology creates stand-alone 3D reconstructions, floating endlessly in grey space.
In this article, I present current research in troubling the embodied encounter with the past, wherein the digital de-naturalizes and disturbs our assumptions about shared experiences with past people while simultaneously transgressing our bounded construction of our current selves. I develop this argument through investigating the avatars, machines, and monsters as productively inhabiting this interstitial space. I argue that a cyborg archaeology can productively comment on the posthuman in archaeology.
Avatars
The OKAPI Island in Second Life reconstruction of Çatalhöyük (2007–2011) was created by a team of students, academics, and technical staff from the University of California, Berkeley, to explore the outreach and interpretive potential of online virtual worlds (Morgan, Reference Morgan2009; Tringham, Reference Tringham, Tringham and Stevanovic2012). The focus was initially on reproducing Neolithic and modern-day architecture alongside displays featuring other multimedia interpretations of Çatalhöyük. Yet during the first online open day, ‘meeting’ the avatars of the far-flung participants in the real-world excavation of Çatalhöyük around a virtual campfire proved to be one of the most compelling aspects of the virtual reconstruction. Users of avatars in virtual worlds are more fully immersed when their bodies ‘feel right’ and allow them to ‘construct, express, and perform the identity they are seeking’ (Taylor, Reference Taylor and Schroeder2002: 52). Some users feel as though their avatars are ‘truer’ reflections of themselves, as ‘“more them” than their corporeal body’ (Taylor, Reference Taylor and Schroeder2002: 54). This sense of identification did not necessarily imply that the avatars looked anything like the users controlling them; project director Ruth Tringham's avatar had green skin (Figure 2), a trait that she was loath to lose, even when asked to change to a more Neolithic shade for a machinima (a movie within a virtual world). Yet Ruth's avatar represented her in-world self so evocatively that she started using the representation in other media, for lectures and on her Facebook wall. Accordingly, when students and staff took on Neolithic avatars to create machinima, there was dissonance between their understanding of their corporeal bodies, the avatars that reflected their mode of expression within the virtual world, and the foreign Neolithic avatars. Most changed back immediately after filming in-world.
Figure 2. Ruth Tringham's avatar.
To contrast with other 3D reconstructions of Çatalhöyük that present a quiet, immersive, genteel, depopulated Neolithic, the use of avatars to navigate OKAPI Island provided a chaotic, dissonant experience that was uncomfortable and occasionally hilarious. Avatars inhabited an interstitial space (Figure 1), a meeting ground between the corporeal body of the user and the remains of Neolithic people of the past. Use of these avatars highlighted the tendency within archaeology to phenomenologically interpret the past as a modern, able-bodied, same-gendered, normative reflection of ourselves. Avatars can radically interfere with our assumptions about the use and navigation of space in the past. During the 2010 field season, I excavated Building 79 at Çatalhöyük and subsequently created a 3D reconstruction of it in Second Life. A building that felt relatively spacious during excavation felt cramped and claustrophobic when trying to move through the space with my avatar; I then became convinced that the excavations at Çatalhöyük were primarily investigating the Neolithic equivalent of basements, fundamentally shifting my previous understanding of these as primary living spaces. Though these explorations were extremely productive, research regarding avatars and virtual archaeology has unfortunately languished, even as new potential within the realm has intensified.
A cyborg archaeology incorporates the embodied representation of the author or user into interpretations. The case study of avatars dwelling in the Çatalhöyük reconstruction on OKAPI Island reveals the importance of embodied interpretation in virtual reconstructions, to challenge static, isolated, uncanny, and authorless 3D representations of archaeological remains (Morgan, Reference Morgan2009). Since the closing of OKAPI Island, 3D models have proliferated in archaeology but there are few with any representations of humans or an embodied way to explore these models. Tringham (Reference Tringham1991a) provided an early critique of this remove as a ‘dehumanized and normatized view of archaeological architecture’ that does not take into account the perspectives of ‘different prehistoric actors who are of different age, gender, power, and life history’ (Reference Tringham1991a: 23; see also Joyce & Tringham, Reference Joyce and Tringham2007). Even fewer 3D models allow persistent dwelling, though archaeologists are increasingly exploring virtual embodiment (Champion, Reference Champion, Kalay, Kvan and Afflect2008), some through the phenomenological exploration of video games (Reinhard, Reference Reinhard, Mol, Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Boom and Politopoulos2017, Reference Reinhard2018). Yet the impulse remains; as Pujol-Tost notes, there is a clear desire amongst archaeologists to create ‘immersive, populated, fully interactive environments that reproduce the multisensory dimension of the world’ (Pujol-Tost, Reference Pujol-Tost2017: 2).
Technology and research regarding avatars have moved rapidly, including greater optical fidelity, affinity with avatars with mirrored gestures, quick-creation of life-like avatar faces, but also revealing greater attachment and empathy through the use of avatars. For example, recent research has shown that changing the virtual race of a user's avatar can increase empathy and reduces implicit racial bias against people of colour (Hasler et al., Reference Hasler, Spanlang and Slater2017). Significantly for archaeologists, researchers are increasingly looking to virtual reality to allow people to take on the perspective of groups that are outside the experience of the user. Bringing together the demonstrable impacts of eliciting understanding and empathy through cultural heritage and through avatars of past people could have a significant influence on perceptions of the past. The stakes are higher when these life-like representations are based on specific evidence such as ancient DNA, isotopic analyses, and other bioarchaeological information.
These converging technologies have the potential both to significantly alter our interpretation of past landscapes and to reconfigure our understanding of ourselves as bounded, modern people. The animation of past people is fraught with complex questions of ethics and identity, tied to diverse ideas regarding the treatment and display of human remains, the depiction of past people, and potential adverse effects of taking on the embodied experience of another person. This is further complicated by the wide range of possibilities involving augmented reality. At the most complex (and hereto purely science fiction) end of this range, wearable technologies could allow a fully reconstructed person to look in the mirror and not see themselves but a past person looking back. The other end of the spectrum could be a geolocated auditory augmented reality that suggests the physical qualities of navigating the space with the bodily affordances of a past person. Though the specific manifestations may be highly diverse, archaeologists must consider the full implications of our resurrections, paying particular attention to feminist posthumanist ethical practice. What are our responsibilities to the people of the past?
Digital reconstruction through avatars is an aggressive re-personalization, an occupation of a dead body. At the same time our construction of the person is acting back upon us, forcing us to consider the landscape and experience the world through bodies different from our own. Through avatars we become distributed people with multiple subjectivities (Turkle, Reference Turkle1997). An engagement with cybernetic posthumanism within digital archaeology and virtual reconstruction would both temper technological determinism and specifically inform our embodied manifestations of archaeological interpretations and growing reliance on screen-work as archaeology (Edgeworth, Reference Edgeworth, Carusi, Sissel Hoel, Webmoor and Woolgar2014). Further, we can move away from presentist constructions of archaeology and acknowledge the porous nature of the past and present in our work.
Monsters
A cyborg archaeology has the synaesthesia of the monster; when brought to digital archaeology, an embodied, emplaced, multisensory experience can profoundly disturb, but also resonate. We accidentally stumbled on this monstrous quality with Voices Re/Cognition, a 2014 Heritage Jam project. A team including Stuart Eve, Colleen Morgan, Alexis Pantos, Sam Kinchin-Smith, Kerrie Hoff, and a remotely-present Shawn Graham created the prototype for an aural augmented reality mobile application (Morgan, Reference Morgan2015; Graham et al., Reference Graham, Eve, Morgan, Pantos, Kee and Compeau2019a). This app aurally emphasized visibly ‘empty’ spaces in York Cemetery, showing them to be full of unmarked graves, and gave ‘voices’ and stories to individual tombstones. Yet these voices all spoke at the same time. Entering the cemetery was like opening the door of a raucous house party. The volume of each ‘voice’ was determined by the user's proximity to the tombstone, like leaning into to overhear groups of people engaged in conversation. Successful ventures into cyborg interpretation should not be a seamless, transhuman integration of machine and body to transmit ideas about the past, but should invoke a monstrous disruption, interfering with both our understanding of the past and current sense of self.
Monsters, in their sensuous, ambivalent in-betweenness, can be an expression of creative impulse, subversion, or evidence of play within archaeology. In their examination of the queer potential of the monstrous, Jones and Harris (Reference Jones and Harris2016) reject the homogenization and mainstreaming of LGBTQI+ narratives and embrace complication and unintelligibility. In a parallel publication, I discuss a queer digital archaeology inspired by subversive acts of détournement, comics, 3D reconstructions, and video games (Morgan, Reference Morgan, Blackmore and Springateforthcoming). To creatively transgress within archaeology is delightful. While working at Leskernick Hill, the Stone Worlds surveyors created wooden house doorways to determine view-sheds, which required ‘people walking over to the other huts, standing on the walls and becoming the huts themselves…everyone was rolling around with laughter at the madness of it all (Bender et al., Reference Bender2007: 53, noted in Eve, Reference Eve2014: 97). In our work on the Media Archaeology Drive Project (MAD-P), we found the application of archaeological methods to examine a computer hard drive ‘the best kind of mischief’, reconfiguring our research and challenging our preconceptions (Perry & Morgan, Reference Perry and Morgan2015: 101). For example, using standard archaeological conventions, such as recording sheets and scale drawings, to document digital media forced us to consider and record digital textures, negative and positive features, and examine icons in exquisite detail. Play is an underrated but deeply important part of creative digital practice in archaeology.
There is also resonance within Shawn Graham and colleagues’ (Reference Graham, Gupta, Smith, Angourakis, Reinhard and Ellenberger2019b) work on productive failure within digital archaeology, to experiment and play without punishment and improve resilience for building a better understanding during the next iteration. For digital archaeological practitioners, failure is a default position: to experiment with new technology and to use it in an unorthodox fashion is to fail spectacularly and repeatedly. For every seamless and verisimilar 3D fly-through presentation (or 2D screenshot reproduced within traditional publication), there is a vast digital graveyard of failed projects. The fragility of digital outputs within archaeology is relatively well documented (see Law & Morgan, Reference Law and Morgan2014, among others), and teaching these technologies leaves an astonishing wreckage of half-realized models, broken databases, and drone videos of grass and boots. The important lesson is to document the paradata (Denard, Reference Denard, Bentkowska-Kafel, Denard and Baker2012), to reveal the monstrous underbellies of our virtual realities, failed and fully realized.
Cyborg archaeology is a practice in worlding, bringing together digital representations of past and present people, places, and things. Creating presence requires a multisensorial engagement with these representations. Angela Piccini (Reference Piccini2015), in a productive discussion of multisensorial worlding that comes from enacting the material-discursive practice through gesture and moving image, notes that the world of archaeology on television is fashioned and transmitted through pointing, touching, contact; the edits create ‘an archaeologist-material-landscape assemblage where the boundaries between each are practised through the abstraction and reconfiguration of multiple, indistinct bodies that resolve as human and non-human, but do not emphasize the ontological separation of the two’ (Piccini, Reference Piccini2015: 65). Tringham's (Reference Tringham and Day2013) multisensory digital archaeology emphasizes haptics to create the present-past Neolithic in Turkey. She aimed to confound and enhance the body's haptic experience by playing with virtual touch, layering realities by introducing a ‘real world’ audio and video guide into the virtual space of the Second Life reconstruction of Çatalhöyük (Tringham, Reference Tringham and Day2013). Similarly, Eve (Reference Eve2014, Reference Eve2018) introduces ‘The Dead Man's Nose’, a simple set-up that allowed the emplacement of various smells from Bronze Age Britain in ‘smellzones’, activated by proximity. Champion notes that ‘new forms of kinaesthetic and sensory perception do not even need to be human in origin’ (Champion, Reference Champion, Kalay, Kvan and Afflect2008: 196), allowing us to proceed as monsters, mingling our senses with plants, animals, artefacts, and architecture.
This confounding of senses is echoed in Hayward's (Reference Hayward2010) haptic-optic ‘fingeryeyes’ designation. Hayward coined the term in her multispecies ethnographic research on cup corals and scientists at the Long Marine Laboratory at Santa Cruz in California to understand the ‘tentacular visuality of cross-species encounters and to name the synaesthetic quality of materialized sensation’. She cites the ‘in-between of encounter, a space of movement, of potential…the transfer of intensity, of expressivity in the simultaneity of touching and feeling (Hayward, Reference Hayward2010: 580 and 581). This is particularly important to meaningful interpretation in archaeology. Hayward refers to Howes’ (Reference Howes and Howes2005: 7) concept of emplacement, ‘the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment’, to which she adds ‘an attention to texture, animation, galvanizing drives… we are embodied in relation to the world’ (Hayward, Reference Hayward2010: 592). Using fingeryeyes to augment and decentre the engagement within archaeological investigation and interpretation had a tentative beginning in transhuman interventions such as Chrysanthi and colleagues' (Reference Chrysanthi, Berggren, Davies, Earl and Knibbe2016) use of personal video recording devices (GoPros) during excavation, or Witmore's (Reference Witmore2004) peripatetic video, but these could be further elaborated on. These interventions highlighted the archaeological gaze and added another interpretive layer to excavation and survey, but did not manage to profoundly change the perception of the viewer or the archaeologist.
I have used the term monster to describe synaesthetic interventions into digital archaeology, but the term also evokes a sense of difference, of other. Monsters ‘represent the in between, the mixed, the ambivalent…[the] horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration’ (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti, Medina, Medina and Stanbury1997: 62). Digital interventions are Frankenstein's monsters, lurching somewhere between Tringham's ‘faceless blobs’ (Reference Tringham, Gero and Conkey1991b) and an idealized ontological collective—networked and multi-faceted but still oddly homogenous. Archaeological monsters are a human and unhuman aggregate, one that digital archaeologists should recognize as we practise assembling ‘articulations among cosmos, animal, human, machine, and landscape in their recursive sidereal, bony, electronic, and geological skeletons’ (Haraway, Reference Haraway, Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler1992: 329). A cyborg archaeology does not create stand-alone interventions but contributes to a collective reimagining of past and present, and of ourselves.
Machines
While I have emphasized the contextual, embodied, and sensory aspects of a cyborg archaeology, we must also attend to the machines. Technoscience, a ‘mutation in historical narrative’ (Haraway, Reference Haraway1997: 4), describes the shift in the relationship between science and technology from mechanical to digital, encompassing the ‘heterogeneous actors in the co-construction of science, technology and society’ (Prasad, Reference Prasad2017: 1). Initial adoption of digital technology within archaeology could be characterized as contributing towards a transhuman archaeology, using science and technology to overcome our perceived human limitations: a ‘rapture of the nerds’ (Sirius & Cornell, Reference Sirius and Cornell2015). This manifests across archaeology, while recording—in our labs, in our socialization, during publication—a map that is the size of the Empire (Borges, Reference Borges and Hurley1998). ‘Paperless’ archaeology, millions of digital archaeological photographs, and instantaneous communication through email, text, and tweets are adopted as transparent, obvious wins in the battle of efficient workflows. Technonormativity abounds. But archaeologists are increasingly acknowledging the properties of digital methods and how these are changing interpretation and dissemination within the field (Perry Reference Perry, Chapman and Wylie2014; Beale & Reilly, Reference Beale and Reilly2017; Huggett, Reference Huggett2017; Huvila, Reference Huvila2018; Morgan & Wright, Reference Morgan and Wright2018; Opitz, Reference Opitz2018; Jones & Diaz-Guardamino, Reference Jones, Diaz-Guardamino, Jones and Diaz-Guardamino2019).
Machines are implicated in interpretation within archaeology, from the use of punch cards (Tringham, Reference Tringham and Boric2010; Květina & Končelová, Reference Květina, Končelová, Biehl and Prescott2013) to various permutations of artificial intelligence including agent-based modelling, machine learning, and natural language processing. Barceló (Reference Barceló, Cameron and Kenderdine2007) posits an automatic archaeology performed by a cognitive robot that solves archaeological problems using mathematics and visual models. New opportunities for the examination and integration of big datasets offer new perspectives on the traditional ‘grand challenges’ of archaeology such as mobility, movement, and migration (Kintigh et al., Reference Kintigh, Altschul, Beaudry, Drennan, Kinzig and Kohler2014; Bevan, Reference Bevan2015; Crema et al., Reference Crema, Bevan and Shennan2017). Artificial intelligence in archaeology and heritage is also becoming apparent in the creation of chatbots, ‘conversational robots designed to mimic human interaction—with varying degrees of success’ (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Gupta, Smith, Angourakis, Reinhard and Ellenberger2019b). Chatbots can be used to broadcast archaeological information on Twitter: for example, Flinders’ head (https://twitter.com/tinyflinders) tweets excerpts from Flinders Petrie's diaries. Chatbots can also be used to interact online with heritage audiences (Tzouganatou, Reference Tzouganatou2018).
Beyond digital tools changing the way archaeology is practised and aiding interpretation and dissemination, there is a broader context of using archaeology to understand technoscience. Assessments of the Anthropocene have framed a discussion of the dense materiality of late capitalism, termed ‘the technosphere’ (Zalasiewicz et al., Reference Zalasiewicz, Williams, Waters, Barnosky, Palmesino and Rönnskog2017). When evaluating the heft of our accumulated technology, Zalasiewicz and colleagues estimated the accumulated materials in which a human component can be identified as weighing 30 trillion tonnes. This is ‘five orders of magnitude greater than the weight of the standing biomass of humans’ sustained by this infrastructure (Zalasiewicz et al., Reference Zalasiewicz, Williams, Waters, Barnosky, Palmesino and Rönnskog2017: 19). Edgeworth (Reference Edgeworth, Torres de Souza and Menezes Costa2018) relates archaeology to the ‘technosphere’ through the ‘archaeosphere’, which he defines as: ‘what gets left behind in the ground when the technosphere ceases to work, consisting of no-longer functioning parts and residues which have become buried’ (Edgeworth, Reference Edgeworth, Torres de Souza and Menezes Costa2018: 26). This recalls the discussion regarding the wreckage of digital projects, the skeletons of our monsters buried in e-waste graveyards.
In these discussions of the materiality of the technosphere, there is a missing data layer that, ironically, can be characterized by a project: TechnoSphere. TechnoSphere was a virtual world inhabited by user-generated artificial life forms, created by Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley in 1995 (Prophet, Reference Prophet1996, Reference Prophet2001). These artificial life forms ate, grew and developed, died, and passed on their genes. The project is no longer online, it ran from 1995 to 2002, then again from 2007 to 2012; arguably it has become part of the digital archaeosphere, with the only surviving remains in journal articles and low-resolution screenshots. The livestock of the data layer, their algorithmic genes, must be recovered from dead drives and data formats. Attending to the machines entails a holistic examination of the entire entity: the hardware, the software, and the human creator and operator.
A contemporary archaeology of the digital is underway. Finn's (Reference Finn2002) formative ‘excavation’ of Silicon Valley and survey of computer collections (Finn, Reference Finn2003) proved to be productive archaeological investigations of what was already becoming ‘retro-tech’. During routine work, Moshenska (Reference Moshenska2014) conserved and documented a USB drive that contained a media assemblage that reflected the everyday life of a young man. Sara Perry and I (Perry & Morgan, Reference Perry and Morgan2015) ‘excavated’ a hard drive by surveying its contents and disassembling the drive into its component parts, finding the translation of formal archaeological recording methods to an unorthodox context illuminating and decentring. Finally, Reinhard's (Reference Reinhard, Mol, Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Boom and Politopoulos2017) research on archaeological investigations of the video game as a built environment and forthcoming investigations of the archaeology of algorithms provides an understanding of the software infrastructures too often constructed as ephemeral. As archaeologists, we are beginning to examine the machines, making them visible so that we can understand how they shape our thinking and how we co-construct almost every aspect of our experience.
Conclusions
Gavin Lucas described the archaeological cyborg as ‘never just a person but always a person with or as part of a larger assemblage of other things—measuring tapes, pencils, cameras, trowels, and so on’ (Lucas, Reference Lucas2012: 239). I have extended this definition considerably by incorporating theory drawn from posthumanist feminism to encourage a creative, generative digital archaeology. The larger assemblage of the archaeological cyborg includes digital tools that can extend authorship into an interstitial space where the dead can interfere with interpretation. Digital archaeology is not so much the creation of efficiencies or a rupture in practice as it is a series of potentials. This article outlines only a few of them. Avatars bring authorship and presence to interpretations and can provide non-normative perspectives informed by the biological affordances of past people. Walking around OKAPI Island as an avatar led me to different conclusions regarding the function of the rooms I had excavated. Monsters assemble humans, non-humans, animals, places, and things into multisensory digital phantasmagoria, allow failure, incite play, and invite subversion. Haunting York Cemetery with digital voices revealed that the visually empty plots of land held multitudes of unknown dead. Machines are our co-authors, our playground, the under-examined skeleton, and the chattering emulators. Excavating a hard drive made us rethink archaeological methodology, and how space might be understood and constructed in the future. Whether or not the neologism of a cyborg archaeology has any traction is immaterial; through examining the avatars, monsters, and machines of digital archaeology, I have populated an interpretive interstitial space between the past and the present. In our future archaeological science fictions, we have these companion species to help us assemble our interpretations.
The future of digital archaeology will probably continue to be skeuomorphic—360° digital live capture of archaeological excavations, better 3D printing, more detailed virtual reconstructions, and insights from big data manipulated by increasingly complex algorithms are all likely candidates and are worthy of investigation. I hope that there will always be room for multisensorial interpretations that compromise boundaries, for playful failure, and non-technonormative projects that threaten traditional understandings of the past.
