Theme:
6. A Decade after the ‘Third Science Revolution in Archaeology’
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Digital Humanities and Medieval Archaeology: Re-Integrating Isolated, Fragmented and Overlooked Archaeological Evidence
Content:
The proposed session aims to bring together researchers from Europe who create digital collections and analyses about diverse archaeological and historical evidence types, primarily archival archaeological data and bioarchaeological data.
Traditionally, archaeological research favours the deep investigation of a site or even a particular object or phenomenon. Apart from exceptional examples traditionally connected to landscape archaeology, medieval archaeology does not usually attempt to analyse a large-scale analysis of sites to investigate more extensive social or economic processes. Nevertheless, archaeology can often provide a much more significant amount of data that could be retrieved from written evidence and thus opens an opportunity to investigate certain parts of the process that has not been possible before. Besides, by applying new quantitative modelling approaches, archaeological evidence can often bring new light to even well-documented historical processes.
Nevertheless, dealing with large-scale archaeological data can also be rather challenging. Ethical issues, data normalisation, methods for analysis and interpretation all have their respective disputes, and the definition of ‘Big Data’, especially in the context of Medieval archaeology, is also debatable. Therefore, the session aims to give a platform to discuss the potential and the challenges that researchers face with ‘Big Data’ in Medieval archaeology, review best practices and possible pitfalls, and have a comparative overview by exploring different projects and investigation directions.
The session welcomes papers focusing on the Middle Ages, within the range of the following topics:
- Digital collection of archaeological sites
- Digital collection and analysis with burial archaeology
- Digital analysis of large-scale archaeological data
- Digital analysis of Medieval processes by archaeological data
- Digital collections and analysis of Medieval material culture
Keywords:
Digital Humanities, GIS, Network analysis, Big Data, Medieval Archaeology
Session associated with MERC:
yes
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Maria Vargha (Czech Republic) 1
Co-organisers:
Stefan Eichert (Austria) 2
Petar Parvanov (Bulgaria) 3
Affiliations:
1. Charles University Prague
2. Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
3. Central European University
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