In this essay, we examine the potentials and challenges of mobile computing for a core activity of archaeological laboratory research—the typological analysis of ceramics. We discuss the collaborative development, implementation, and evaluation of the PAZC Ceramics module in the FAIMS Mobile platform. Our deployment of the module yielded significant improvements in the efficiency of data collection, as well as reduced numbers of missing fields and higher user satisfaction scores. However, it did not improve data consistency between users and yielded a classificatory system that was somewhat more challenging to update than our previous mode of operation. These results underscore some of the trade-offs that may be entailed in employing mobile technologies for archaeological applications and highlight the ways in which specific media configurations impact the production of archaeological knowledge.

The experimental replication of lithic artifacts occasionally encounters issues of standardization and control. Two major issues are how to accurately create a large sample population and how to sample from specific stages over the flaking process. Knappable stone is unpredictable due to inclusions, cracks, and differences in size, texture, and fracture toughness. While this aspect of stone is critical to understanding some aspects of human behavior, decision-making, and skill assessment, in some experimental studies it may hinder other areas. Research for a large study assessing the failure of Folsom preforms during the fluting stage required many knappable facsimiles. The process outlined here uses porcelain as a medium for tackling these requirements. The new method presented here illustrates how a 3-D scanner and printer can be used to record and produce a copy of the artifact form. It then describes how to create a plaster mold of the printed artifact form and, finally, how to cast and fire the artifact replica in porcelain.

Digital literacy has been cited as one of the primary challenges to ensuring data reuse and increasing the value placed on open science. Incorporating published data into classrooms and training is at the core of tackling this issue. This article presents case studies in teaching with different published data platforms, in three different countries (the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States), to students at different levels and with differing skill levels. In outlining their approaches, successes, and failures in teaching with open data, it is argued that collaboration with data publishers is critical to improving data reuse and education. Moreover, increased opportunities for digital skills training and scaffolding across program curriculum are necessary for managing the learning curve and teaching students the values of open science.

Gorée Island is Senegal's first site on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It is associated with the infamous Atlantic slave trade, and over the past few decades, Gorée has become a prime destination for global tourism, particularly for the African diaspora from the New World but also for many Europeans and African nationals. Today, Gorée is a forum where different stakeholders battle over the role, place, and significance of the island in the Atlantic slave trade and its enduring legacies in the present. While Gorée owes much of its reputation to its heritage, including architecture, archaeology, and monuments, recent controversies over site preservation and policy compliance raised questions about heritage presentation and consumption. This article analyzes stakeholders’ attitudes toward archaeology and heritage to gain insights on how they are presented and consumed by different stakeholders and eventually destroyed by them as well. The discussion shows ambiguous attitudes toward site presentation and preservation, which might be linked either to stakeholders’ subjectivities or hypocrisy or to poor and uncoordinated communication strategies by heritage professionals.

In the push to provide further interaction with museum and heritage exhibitions, the internet has become an established venue, offering nearly unlimited space and options for providing extensions to in-person content. These internet-based supplements in many cases outlast the physical displays they are meant to accompany. After the exhibitions have closed and the museums have moved on, the digital content remains, a static placeholder for a particular viewpoint on heritage, curation, and public outreach. Such is the case with the Interface Experience, the Web extension to the exhibition of the same name, which ran for a few months in 2015 (Bard Graduate Center [BGC] 2014a). This site, which remains largely functional, is now disconnected from the exhibition it was meant to accompany, leaving it to stand alone as a study on the connections between digital outputs and materiality.

In 1979, Edward C. Harris invented and published his eponymous matrix for visualizing stratigraphy, creating an indispensable tool for generations of archaeologists. When presenting his matrix, Harris also detailed his four laws of archaeological stratigraphy: superposition, original horizontal, original continuity, and stratigraphic succession. In 2017, I created the first stratigraphic matrix for software, using as a test the 2016 video game No Man's Sky (Hello Games). Software (games or otherwise) obeys all four of Harris's laws, software applications/programs themselves being digital archaeological sites. I study the archaeology of the recent past, which includes digital technology, specifically that which is ephemeral: software. This article describes my underlying theory of software stratigraphy and explains how (and why) the Harris matrix is appropriate for documenting software development in a visual way. The article includes my complete data set as well as screen captures, plus overall and detail photos of my hand-drawn software matrix prototype, followed by a bullet-pointed how-to guide for others to use when documenting the history of any computer program. I also include Harris's personal comments that he shared with me after reviewing my preliminary results.

Quadrotor-UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in archaeological field research for the production of digital elevation models and orthophoto mosaics of sites, monuments, and landscapes. In order to make up for the lack of suitable imagery to use in a larger project on the landscapes surrounding Bronze Age tell sites in the Murghab delta of eastern Turkmenistan, we developed a protocol for the deployment of out-of-the-box UAV systems to document sites and their immediate environs. This article discusses the fundamentals of aerial survey based on our experience deploying a quadrotor UAV, using examples from our case study of the site of Togolok 1. We argue that the approach we developed is particularly useful for mesoscale survey, between 1 and 5 km2, and is particularly useful for producing technical quality outputs, even by relative newcomers to UAV-based aerial survey.

Westgate Oxford is a commercial redevelopment of a large shopping complex in the center of Oxford, with clients Westgate Oxford Alliance and principal contractor Laing O'Rourke. The excavations, carried out by Oxford Archaeology, between 2014 and 2016, were required as part of UK Planning Guidelines and were the largest ever undertaken in the city and principally focused on a large medieval suburban friary. The project won Best Archaeological Project 2016 at the prestigious national British Archaeological Awards, and the outreach program, which included an evolving pop-up museum, was a significant contributing factor. This essay will demonstrate how to set up a pop-up museum in eight steps. The essay will look at how to work with different partners of a project. It will discuss choosing a story to tell and how to deal with a changing narrative on an archaeological site in “real time.” It will show how the Pop Up museum became the principal location for dissemination for the Westgate Oxford project. The essay will conclude with how to keep the story alive and plans for the future of the Westgate Oxford Pop Up Museum.

In early 2017, Sarah Parcak used her $1 million TED Prize to build the GlobalXplorer° platform (https://www.globalxplorer.org) “to identify and quantify looting and encroachment to sites of archaeological and historical importance,” using a crowdsourced “citizen science” methodology popularized by the Zooniverse web portal. GlobalXplorer° invited the public to search satellite imagery from Peru for evidence of looting within 100 m × 100 m squares, training them along the way and gamifying participation. In this review, I test the platform and consider the applicability of GlobalXplorer° as a vector for changing the way that the general public perceives the global illicit trade in cultural objects.

From a perusal of archaeological and museum journals it is apparent that there is a rich literature dealing with topics such as the place of museums and repositories in anthropological research, engagement with indigenous/descendant populations by archaeologists working in a variety of settings (including collections-based research), and research centered on the study of existing archaeological collections. Despite this rich literature, however, the archaeological researcher who wishes to use collections in archives, museums, or repositories for the first time is often perplexed by how to gain access to collections, how to communicate with archive/museum/repository professionals, the constraints that archive/museum/repository professionals work under, and—at an even more basic level—what the difference between an archive, a museum, and a repository actually is. This article addresses some of these questions and provides a practical guide to opening up the vast research opportunities presented by existing collections.

The problem for archaeologists doing public outreach could be that we do not know who our audience is. Marketing to just the public at large is an extremely broad approach filled with the pitfalls of not engaging enough of the public, so it might be necessary to first find out who within the general public would have the most interest in your discovery and then tailor your presentation to that audience. At the podcast Cooking with Archaeologists we are using digital media, social media marketing, and our experience from the business world to do just that. Podcasting has been a trial-and-error project filled with uncertainty and doubt, and for archaeologists engaged in public archaeology it might be a practical approach to reaching the public and a medium to build an engaged and interested audience. In this “how-to” article, we will reveal what we have learned from this exciting and somewhat demanding venture and suggest how podcasting is a democratizing venture that connects the public to archaeology and the archaeologist.

In the original publication of this article, the middle initial of the second author was incorrect. The authors apologize for this error. The original article has since been corrected.

In the digital age, cultural organizations strive to retain audience engagement especially via experimentation with novel technologies and social media. The latter are increasingly influencing the way cultural heritage is perceived, providing options for grappling with crucial issues in the sector, including sustainability, openness, and public participation. One tool that has been deployed to explore these issues is the chatbot, a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the internet. Chatbots run through different conversational interfaces, but they have a particularly heavy application in Facebook Messenger. Within the museums and cultural sector specifically, these robotic media are regularly proclaimed to offer novel engagement mechanisms that can empower participants to actively participate in the heritage process. However, most heritage Messenger bots are purely informative and object- or exhibit-centered, providing little opportunity for meaningful interactivity, creative expression, or critical engagement. This article explores and critically reviews three Messenger chatbots related to heritage organizations, concluding with suggestions for their future development.

Teaching and public engagement with the results and implications of bioarchaeological research have increasingly attracted more varied and social media-savvy audiences. Since 2010, the social media platform Instagram has also flourished, with millions of users forming untold numbers of communities of practice. Here, I seek to address the intersection of bioarchaeology and the virtual “stage” that social media represents. How is the discipline of bioarchaeology and the act of being a bioarchaeologist represented on Instagram? How do practicing bioarchaeologists (and enthusiastic supporters of the field) communicate about their own and others’ research, fieldwork, laboratory work, et cetera? With ever-greater amounts of scientific communication and public outreach conducted over social media (e.g., Gura 2013; Kling and McKim 2000; Wheat et al. 2013), it is worth investigating how the living who study the dead interact with each other, form community, and engage online audiences that increasingly contain descendants of the dead being studied. The review below is short; hence, the nature and depth of inquiry is restricted. Nevertheless, enough data are available to allow broader speculation and to suggest that there is space for more concerted future research.