Internet Archaeology (Jan 2001)
Review of On the Theory and Practice of Archaeological Computing [Book]
Abstract
It might seem rather old-fashioned that, at the start of the new millennium, a book on archaeological computing should be published solely in traditional hard copy format. However, whilst the black-and-white screen shots would no doubt have been improved by colour representation, this book generally succeeds as a paper volume. That it does so is due, at least in part, to the fact that the emphasis is not so much on the technology and how to do it, but rather on how the technology affects the discipline, justifying Internet Archaeology to vary its normal policy of only reviewing electronic publications. The book began as a conference session on the impact of computers on archaeological theory and practice, held at the 4th World Archaeological Congress in Cape Town in January 1999. It comprises nine papers, plus a short introduction by the editors, in which they note that their volume needs to be seen in the tradition of Cooper and Richards (1985) and Reilly and Rahtz (1992), rather than the more methodological and positivist approach adopted by many of the papers published in the annual proceedings of the Computer Applications in Archaeology (CAA) Conference. That some eight years have passed since the last survey indicates how timely this latest analysis is.
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