Archaeology is finally catching up with the so-called "digital humanities," as evidenced by a February special edition of the Journal of Field Archaeology, devoted entirely to discussing the myriad ways in which large-scale datasets and associated analytics are transforming the field. The papers included in the edition were originally presented during a special session at a 2019 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The data sets might be a bit smaller than those normally associated with Big Data, but this new "digital data gaze" is nonetheless having a profound impact on archaeological research.
As we've reported previously, more and more archives are being digitized within the humanities, and scholars have been applying various analytical tools to those rich datasets, such as Google N-gram, Bookworm, and WordNet. Close reading of selected sources—the traditional method of the scholars in the humanities—gives a deep but narrow view. Quantitative computational analysis can combine that close reading with a broader, more generalized bird's-eye approach that can reveal hidden patterns or trends that otherwise might have escaped notice. The nature of the data archives and digital tools are a bit different in archaeology, but the concept is the same: combine the traditional "pick and trowel" detailed field work on the ground with more of a sweeping, big-picture, birds-eye view, in hopes of gleaning hidden insights.
One paper in particular demonstrates the power of this approach, authored by anthropologists Steven Wernke and Parker VanValkenburgh, of Vanderbilt University and Brown University, respectively. They collaborated with fellow co-author Akira Saito, an ethnohistorian with the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan, to develop two online databases, and used them to bring a fresh perspective to the forced resettlement of the Inca Empire in the 1570s by Spanish conquerors.
The Linked Open Gazetteer of the Andean Region (LOGAR) is designed to collect primary source information on relevant locations of interest to those who study the Andes region. It includes information collected from a comprehensive record of the resettlement known as the "Tasa de la Visita General," maintained by the Spanish-appointed viceroy of Peru. The Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, History and Archaeology (GeoPACHA) complements LOGAR. It's an open-source, browser-based platform that lets users discover and document archaeological sites in the Andes by systematically surveying satellite and historic aerial imagery, via networks of trained teams.
The trio were able to create a comprehensive basemap of the planned colonial towns (reducciones) built during that mass resettlement. That helped them spot an intriguing pattern in the distribution of those reducciones:it seemed to follow a remarkably similar distribution of the Inca imperial infrastructure, namely its road system. Specifically, they noted similar clustering of populations in the greater Cuzco and Lima areas. "The Spanish, after about 40 years of being in Peru, were trying to figure out how to govern this vast territory," VanValkenburgh told Ars. "They directly imitated what the Inca were doing. The resettlement was one of the initiatives at the core of that attempt to reimagine Spanish governance in an Inca model."
This new emphasis on using the digital tools of Big Data doesn't mean archaeologists are "throwing in the trowel" when it comes to traditional field work, however. Wernke and VanValkenburgh discussed with Ars the necessity of maintaining a crucial balance between the two approaches, as well as expounding upon the potential advantages and drawbacks of tapping into the power of scale.
Ars Technica: Archaeology has been lagging behind the humanities in terms of incorporating these techniques. Why is that?
Steven Wernke: Archaeologists generally think of field-collected data as the gold standard and we tend to be very bound to that standard.
