The Most Important Idea
Archaeology isn’t necessarily about the past. It’s about the materiality of the past and present and in many ways, the future. We try to understand what it is to be human through the extended abilities that tool use, that objects and their agencies, give to us. The digital tools we use are entangled with and extend humanity in powerful ways - and in 2025, it’s easy to see how digital technologies have extended humanity’s worst impulses.
It’s going to be uncomfortable. There will be things we try here that will not work. The way things break is as important as the way things work. Through broken things, and through breaking things, we learn how the world can be imagined.
Archaeology is world-building:
My Philosophy of Learning
As a general philosophy of learning, I do not aim for coverage. Rather, I am trying to help you learn the skills that you will need to uncover whatever aspect of method and thought that will help you with your research goals. A big part of that is trying to teach how to deal with what might feel like ‘failure’, on first blush. I want you to swing for the bleachers, and not to be afraid of whiffing on the ball. After all, to mix sporting metaphors, you’re here for ice-time, not the Stanley Cup.
On another note, this course originally was intended to be a kind of hybrid course, blending face to face work in the classroom with resources and digital tools. Social learning is one of the things that makes us human. An asynchronous class is still a social space; it just means that your and I have to work harder at fostering the social aspect of learning and connection.
You have to do the work, right? Learning is an active thing.
Text/Tech
To the best of my ability, all materials will either be open access materials on the web or materials made available to us through MacOdrum Library or the University. You will not be required to purchase any set text or software.
Having a reasonably up-to-date computer will make life easier for you; if you use a chromebook or a low-powered laptop (eg, less than 8 gb of RAM), this will require us to think creatively about some of the work, but should not present an insurmountable obstacle. A good internet connection will make life easier, but I realize that not everyone is well-served by our tech oligopolies. Please let me know if these situations apply to you so that we can work out a suitable plan of action.
Class format
This class will be delivered online, asynchronously. Learning materials will be curated on this open course website, and might include a variety of modalities. There will be no required synchronous chats or lectures. Students will maintain course research notebooks on the web (which may be anonymous or pseudonymous or made private provided access is shared with me).
Why?
I’ve taught online for a variety of institutions, using a variety of formats and approaches. I like teaching asnchronously because I believe it is a kinder approach to complex topics, especially when there is a second layer of difficulty - basic digital literacy, in this case - which intersects with the content, my learning goals for you, your own personal situations - in ways I cannot always anticipate or know.
Since I cannot know these things, I do not believe that I should bludgeon you with content; I do not think that ‘rigour’ is demonstrated by forcing you to join me at set times; I do not believe that face-to-face work is somehow more ‘scholarly’ than other kinds of work. Right now, with the world the way it is, I want to build a structure that opens possibility space for you to engage with this topic, and with ‘digital archaeology’ when you encounter it beyond this course, in ways that will push you forward as a scholar and citizen.
For this to work well, it requires you to be on the same page as me. There is a lot of flexibility built into this course, but it does require you to try to push yourself out of your comfort zone. The key thing is always to tie what you’re doing with what you’re reading and what you’re thinking. That ‘second layer of difficulty’ will come with practice. But how it intersects with everything else: that’s where the learning happens.
It might seem a bit macabre or ‘off’ somehow to build some of our work around the ways the dead are memorialized in Canadian graveyards, in this day and age. I wrestled with this. But I settled on doing this for a variety of reasons:
- Getting you outside and doing one variety of archaeological work and thinking through how tech intersects with field work and the realities of space is a valuable exercise
- It gives us data that we can work on later as the weather grows colder; and more importantly:
- We don’t often talk about death in modern Western culture. Memorialization and its practices can reveal much about past human groups, but in the gaps with our present day, it can also teach us much about ourselves.
…and that is why this course is the way it is. No doubt, things will break, and some things will work better/be more effective than others. We will roll with it.
AI
If you went to a gym, and there was a machine that lifted weights up and down for you, could you say that you’ve had a work-out, if the machine moved the weights around? Because isn’t that the point of a gym: moving weights from A to B? So a machine would be more efficient, and better at it?
That sound you hear is of a point being missed. The correct answer is, ’no’. The correct answer is, we lift the weights so that our muscles undergo the process of strengthening, conditioning, developing.
In the same way, the use of any generative AI system to create written work in this class is a pointless stupid thing to do. In the same way having a machine lift weights for you misses the point, so too does having a machine generate statistical chains of plausible bullshit. You’re in university to develop your mind, not to have a stack of papers on your desk.
You lift weights so that your body undergoes the process. The process is the point. You write to train your mind to think, to put your mind through a process.
The point was never to have x number of things-written. Yet, many people seem to treat university as the accumulation of papers in exchange for a piece of paper. That is profoundly sad.
Archaeology has long used machine learning, simulation, and other kinds of complex modeling. I’ll teach you how to build something real, using machine learning, artificial neural networks and so on. There will be times when I explicitly show you how various kinds of AI work. THOSE ARE THE ONLY TIMES and contexts in which it will be ok to work with generative AI.
Lift the weights for yourself. Anything else is… point-less. Null points. 0.
(I’ve written two books on artificial intelligence in archaeology. I know what I’m talking about.)