Session: #1170

Content:

Archaeology has traditionally struggled with interdisciplinarity. While the discipline has always been eager to borrow methods and approaches from other fields, it has often failed to integrate them into its core. Furthermore, this attempt to be interdisciplinary has focused strongly on borrowing methodologies from the more scientifically oriented approaches, leaving qualitative methods and subjectivity relegated to very few cases. Indeed, the exploration of affects, senses, and emotions in the past is typical of disciplines such as history, human geography, and literature, even if it would be highly relevant in archaeology as well.
With the unstoppable expansion of the digital world, archaeology faces again the same old dilemma: How can we shift towards a more integrative interdisciplinary framework, rather than instrumentalizing punctual approaches from other disciplines? Shall we just adopt the methods of digital humanities, or will we be finally able to integrate them? How can we integrate the subjective aspect of material culture as affects, senses, and emotions into sciences, and into digital archaeology? Above all: can archaeology be effectively interdisciplinary?
This session is interested in exploring how interdisciplinarity can be integrated into the current digital world that is revolutionizing the discipline. Can we create digital archaeological maps that include geographical and historical data, but also speak about a sense of place? Can we introduce emotional communities into our predictive modeling? Where are the senses in our material analyses? Can we include affective actants in our network analyses?
We welcome any paper that aims to go this step further into interdisciplinarity, bridging the gap between sciences and humanities, and particularly within digital methodologies.

Session: #1170

Theme & Session Format

Title & Content

Organisers