Internet Archaeology (Oct 2012)
Archaeology 2.0? Review of Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration [Web Book]
Abstract
The Cotsen Institute in Los Angeles has launched a new publishing initiative in 'Digital Archaeology'. Its first book, Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration, edited by Eric C. Kansa, Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Ethan Watrall, makes a grand claim, if only in its title, that archaeology has undergone, or is about to undergo, changes that bring about a completely new version or kind of archaeology. The analogy is with the World Wide Web. Just as the IT world embraced radical changes of software design and web delivery nearly ten years ago and announced that this was Web version 2.0, so too archaeology is changed, the authors claim, and enough to warrant the designation version 2.0. We disagree and argue that the claim is not well supported. Moreover, we hold that the book misunderstands the implications of Web 2.0 and its aftermath. The well-meaning authors do make a valuable contribution to debates about uses of information technology in archaeology, and particularly data management. But their perspective is hopelessly narrow, looking back to the circumscribed concerns of professional field archaeologists with their data, its dissemination, use and survival. The authors focus mainly upon their own projects, expressing little interest in the scope of contemporary archaeology, digitally enabled as it all is, through heritage and everything to do with the representation of the material past in the present, an interest surely begged by the overt reference to the global changes associated with the notion of Web 2.0.
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