Internet Archaeology (Mar 2011)
On the Record: The Philosophy of Recording
Abstract
At the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference in Durham in December 2009 I organised a session on the philosophy of recording, and the three articles presented here originated in that discussion. The aim of the session was to consider some fundamental questions about the recording that archaeologists undertake but which are often overlooked, and think about these in a theoretical way. These questions included: ◦Why do we choose to record the sites, monuments and artefacts that we do? Why do we select the units of information we choose to record about them? How have the things we record and the attributes recorded changed over time? ◦How can the adoption of a reflexive approach enable us to assess the recording choices we make and inform those that will be made in the future? ◦What do these recording choices tell us about archaeology and wider society over time? ◦Can something as intangible as a database record or a digital photograph be considered as an artefact and studied as material culture? ◦How are new technologies changing recording and adding to the material available for study, which will form the historic documents of the future? The first two of these questions are decisions that archaeologists have been making since the earliest origins of the discipline, often without a passing thought. It is not very often that we pause to analyse them at a theoretical level. As recording has developed we have been very good at categorizing, making inventories and constructing ontologies to describe the past around us, but less good about asking why we do so in the way we do.
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