News

Are you involved in a local, national, or international archaeology society? Are you the publisher of an archaeological magazine or journal? Do you work for a national heritage body, commercial archaeology unit or consultancy?

One way that your organization can get involved in the Society for Historical Archaeology’s annual conference at the University of Leicester on 9th – 12th January 2013, is by exhibiting your products, services and publications at the conference’s Archaeology Market Place. Formerly known as the Book Room, the Archaeology Market Place will include exhibits of products, services and organizations in the archaeological community. This is both an opportunity to support the conference, and to advertise your services to a new, receptive audience.

The 46th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology will include an estimated 500 scholarly presentations on all aspects of historical archaeology, and many more delegates, representing organizations from across the world. The conference theme is Globalisation, Immigration, Transformation – reflecting both the vibrant multicultural history and contemporary character of the city of Leicester, but also acknowledging the transformation of historical archaeology into a global discipline. Centrally located in the heart of the English midlands, Leicester is well connected by air, rail, and motorway links, and an international audience is assured.

Information about exhibiting at the SHA conference Archaeology Market Place can be found in the Exhibitor Prospectus, here. Manned tables for companies, publishers and for profit organizations (includes one full conference registration and one exhibitor staff registration) cost $500, and only $300 for University presses, sister organizations, museums, government agencies and non-profit organizations. Un-manned browsing tables are also available.

We hope that you will join us in Leicester, England 9th – 12th January 2013, at the University of Leicester.

It’s Tech Week on the Blog and the Technology Committee has something special in store. We have brought together three innovators in the field of online databases and data sharing, and have asked each author to answer a question:

Where do you see online databases and data sharing in five to ten years? What role do you see your respective organization playing in the larger field of archaeological data sharing and online databases? What major hurdles do you think stand in the way of wide scale acceptance and use of online databases in the archaeological community?

Our contributors:

Mark Freeman from Stories Past

• Mark has worked with the National Park Service and a range of other groups to develop online databases for everything from data driven research databases to interactive education modules. Primarily working with museums and governmental agencies, Mark represents the cutting edge in online databases and data sharing.

Jillian Galle from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS)

• DAACS, which is based in Monticello’s archaeology department, is one of the largest and most respected online databases for Historical Archaeology. Starting in 2000, when many archaeologists hadn’t even thought of online databases, DAACS was working hard to provide researchers information that would normally take years to get. Jillian has been the DAACS project manager for twelve years and is a pioneer in online databases and data sharing.

Adam Brin and Frank McManamon from the Center for Digital Antiquity

• When you think of online databases and data sharing, the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) is probably one of the first things that come to mind. Adam and Frank work with a wide range of database professionals and archaeologists, and have created an extensive database for everything from digital documents to data sets to GIS files. tDAR represents a digital repository for archaeological data from all over the world. Perhaps the largest archaeological database, tDAR is constantly working to bring more information to researchers and to expand our understanding of the history and prehistory of the world.

Each author has provided us with an interesting view point from their own personal experience and organization. By looking at each post, it should be possible to get a good understanding of where data sharing has come from, where it is going, and what is on the horizon. We encourage you to read the posts and join in the conversation in the comment section or on Twitter, using the #SHAtechWk hashtag.

• The Posts:
• Mark Freeman: Primary Archaeology data for non-archaeologists?
• Jillian Gale: Will Today’s Historical Archaeology Training Predict the Future of Digital Research Archives?
• Adam Brin and Frank McManamon: Sustainable Archaeological Databases – A View from Digital Antiquity

Click on the banner at the bottom of each post to return to this page! Thanks for reading, and enjoy Tech Week!

This post is part of the May 2012 Technology Week, a quarterly topical discussion about technology and historical archaeology, presented by the SHA Technology Committee. This week’s topic examines the use and application of digital data in historical archaeology. Visit this link to view the other posts.

Is there value in exposing archaeological primary data to non-professional audiences? Can online archaeology databases serve broader goals? Can they both inform and serve as a tool for advocacy at time when the practice of archaeology is again being challenged in popular culture?

The National Park Services museum.nps.gov.

The National Park Service website, museum.nps.gov, is the online face of ICMS, the database tool that the Department of the Interior uses to manage its collections. In pre-launch testing the most common reaction was surprise that the parks actually had collections. Individual parks decide what to present on the website and it currently includes nearly 450,000 records, representing over four million objects, half of which are archaeological. Some information is removed before it reaches the web. Crucially for archaeology, this includes site name, site location, within-site provenience and UTM data; excluded to protect sites from the very real threat of looting, and at the request of Native American groups.

But stripping the artifacts of physical context before they reach the web is problematic at best for archaeology, so an attempt has been made to restore some contextual information. Collection highlights were developed to be used by the park staff to allow the grouping of objects, creating a virtual context that can represent a physical space – a site or an archaeological feature – or a thematic context, or a virtual exhibit. Fort Vancouver National Historic Site has created several highlights, including The Fort Vancouver Village. The highlight includes narrative text to explain the complex cultural landscape and is supported by 32 selected artifacts. Those artifacts are hyper-linked to the over two hundred thousand records which are part of Fort Vancouver’s online collection. I’d argue that even if most visitors never look at those records. they need to know that they are there. The National Park Service doesn’t just have great scenery, they have curated over forty million cataloged objects.

At Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia plantation along the Potomac River, The South Grove midden excavation uncovered more than 60,000 artifacts. These represent almost 400 ceramic and glass vessels, hundreds of pounds of brick, mortar, and plaster fragments from renovating buildings, buckles, buttons, tobacco pipes, and more than 30,000 animal bones. A new website (in progress at www.mountvernonmidden.com) focuses on 400 objects, but the full database is there (and available on the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery site) and items are presented in the context of the wider collection. Additionally, the website includes a timeline, a map of the site in relation to the broader plantation landscape, historical notes and related published papers, and a database of the Washington family Invoices and Orders – all part of the larger data set that comprises the project.

So site databases, like the truth, need to be out there. Showing artifacts to the public, without this data-rich environment, suggests that just a few objects have primacy, elevating the qualitative over the quantitative. And if archaeologists want support for the process of archaeology and for digital preservation, then showing the volume of data makes sense.

The problem of exposing the soft underbelly of archaeological data is that at least some members of the public might start to question what’s presented. Why is it so hard to compare one site with another? Why are different methodologies used at different sites? Why does every project record different information? Why does the terminology differ between sites? There is a slow move forward in addressing all these issues (Kansa et al. 2011), but if archaeologists want to hammer home the point that pot hunting and looting are bad, then they should be willing to present and rationalize the datasets that professional archaeologists creates.

I’m not suggesting that advocacy is the only reason to show data. As text books and other electronic publications slowly transition from electronic copies of physical books into fully interactive media, perhaps they’ll also start to include accessible databases, and not just as appendices. Database could support graphs and result sets, allowing data to be manipulated, examined and even challenged. Perhaps eventually these datasets could be more than just one-way presentations of data. On websites, by recording the questions asked of the data, by tracking the datasets produced, these databases might come to be a part of research as well as publication.

References Cited

• Eric C. Kansa, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, & Ethan Watrall
• 2011 ARCHAEOLOGY 2.0 New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration, Cotsen Digital Archaeology.

This post is part of the May 2012 Technology Week, a quarterly topical discussion about technology and historical archaeology, presented by the SHA Technology Committee. This week’s topic examines the use and application of digital data in historical archaeology. Visit this link to view the other posts.

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (http://www.daacs.org/) provides standardized artifact, contextual, spatial, and image data from excavated sites of slavery throughout the early modern Atlantic World. Currently, DAACS is the largest archive, paper or digital, of standardized archaeological data related to slavery and slave societies. We have built it, with grant funds, generous data sharing, and intellectual input of more than 50 collaborating archaeologists and historians. For over ten years, these scholars and many others have contributed to DAACS’ overarching goal: to facilitate the comparative archaeological study of the spatial and temporal variation in slavery and the archaeological record by providing standardized archaeological data from multiple archaeological sites that were once homes to enslaved Africans.

DAACS strives to achieve this goal by giving researchers access to detailed standardized archaeological data in a format that allows the assemblages to be seamlessly compared quantitatively without any additional processing by the researcher.  We do so by physically reanalyzing the assemblages, and their associated contexts, to the same classification and measurement protocols that were established with the help of the DAACS Steering Committee in 2000. This is the critical aspect of the DAACS program—providing the standardized data that are essential to any comparative archaeological study.

DAACS data are stored in a massive relational Structured Query Language (SQL) database and are delivered over the internet via the DAACS website. The website debuted in 2004 with complete data sets from 15 domestic slave sites in Virginia. They were made available then, as they are today, through an easy-to-use, point-and-click query interface. By the end of 2012, DAACS will contain complete archaeological datasets, including data on over 2 million artifacts, from sixty sites of slavery in Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Jamaica, Nevis, and St. Kitts.

During the past year, over 10,000 unique visitors have landed on the DAACS website. Many DAACS users go straight for the Archive’s meta-data: the section of the website that contains information on the DAACS data structures and authority terms, DAACS cataloging manuals and stylistic element guides, and research papers and posters.  Others spend time browsing and reading through the archaeological sites pages, the text-heavy portion of the DAACS website that provides extensive background data on each site, site chronologies, access to images and maps, and bibliographies. We consider these pages essential to anyone using the archaeological data accessible through the DAACS Query Module.

Visitors often move from the background pages to the DAACS Query Module, which provides access to standardized data on hundreds-of-thousands of artifacts and archaeological contexts. The query interface masks a complex set of queries to the relational database that contains the raw archaeological data from all sites in the Archive. Queried data are returned and made available to users through the web browser and through downloadable ASCII files that can easily be imported into the user’s favorite statistical package.

DAACS is explicitly and clearly designed for large-scale comparative archaeological research. The website features—the Query Module, Archaeological Sites Pages, and corresponding meta-data—are critical to meeting the goals of the project.

In the evolving ecology of accessible digital data, digital archives vary in the extent to which they are designed to facilitate comparative research versus the extent to which they facilitate and make possible the preservation of archaeological data. These elements of online archives and databases are not mutually exclusive; many research archives preserve data and preservation archives encourage research. Projects such as tDAR (The Digital Archaeological Record) and ADS (Archaeological Data Service) are essential to the preservation of born-digital data generated by individual researchers. These critical resources preserve and make searchable data from any type of archaeological project, regardless of region or time period. Data from projects range from digital reports and basic finds lists to full-blown archaeological databases. However, there are comparability problems, to the extent that the contributing researchers use different classification and measurement protocols.

To date, research archives have focused on specific regions and time periods in order to provide datasets that enable researchers to address synthetic research questions. Examples include the Chaco Research Archive, A Comparative Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture, and DAACS. These projects provide a venue in which protocols that work well in particular times and places encourage individual researchers to think seriously about how to ensure their data plays well with others’ data, making it easier to researchers to glimpse the fruits of comparative analysis that shared protocols make possible.

But each archive type requires specific tradeoffs. For research archives making comparative quantitative research easy requires standardization.  However, it is not clear how, over the long-term, the requisite standardization will emerge. Sites like DAACS may be one way forward. No matter where one sits on the continuum, a firm commitment to open and transparent data sharing underpins all digital archiving projects.

The demand for archives that specialize in digital data preservation and accessibility will continue to grow as individuals, museums, universities, and the government grapple with archiving and making the large quantities of archaeological data they curate accessible. The success and growth of research archives that generate detailed comparable digital data accessible for the explicit research purposes will depend on how we meet the analytical needs of inquisitive archaeological researchers.

Over the past six years, we’ve seen a marked increase in the number of graduate students who approach us with the desire to pursue data-driven comparative research.  Their questions and needs may be a bellwether for the development, use and longevity of research archives.

Our experience at DAACS is that undergraduate and graduate students are eager to engage in archaeological data analysis, both on the single site and comparative levels.  They come to DAACS asking questions that require serious archaeological data analysis however many are missing two critical skills: the ability to link arguments about what happened in the past to archaeological variation and the skills in data analysis that allow them to summarize patterns in the data that speak to the arguments.

A concrete example is one related to chronology. Chronological control is the critical first analytical step in doing any archaeological study, whether at a single site or comparative analysis – you do not want to mistake temporal change for synchronic variation. Yet we have discovered that graduate students who have completed their coursework in Historical Archaeology do not know how to get started. From framing an argument to executing data retrieval, discovering patterns in the results, and linking those patterns back to the original argument we have discovered that most historical archaeology students come to us seeking advice on where and how to begin working with their data and the data in DAACS. An informal survey suggests that one reason is that only a handful of graduate programs that provide advanced degrees with specializations in historical archaeology require students to take even a single course in statistical methods.

But it is clear that students (and our colleagues) want more resources for learning how to work with these data. We receive regular requests to provide training in statistical analysis and to teach the more arcane analytical methods that we occasionally use but which are necessary to fully engage with the quantity of fine-grained data available through DAACS.

As the promise of using online databases for research has become increasingly obvious over the past five years, the demand for data has risen. It is how we meet the demand not only for the data but also for the analytical skills to make sense of the data that will determine the trajectory of online databases in the next 5 to 10 years.

While I worry about the trajectory of archaeological training, I remain sanguine about the promise of research archives in large part because I am lucky enough to work with graduate and undergraduate students engaging with DAACS’s online database, students who work doggedly to learn methods they were never taught, and who have come to realize that the data in DAACS are so rich that the hard work it takes to learn analytical approaches to their data provides big payoffs and exciting answers to previously unanswerable questions.

Many SHA members realize that Parks Canada has recently been subjected to absolutely draconian cuts that risk crippling one of the world’s most influential stewards for cultural and natural heritage and historical archaeological research.  Very few historical archaeology labs are not outfitted with a host of essential Parks Canada publications like Olive Jones and Catherine Sullivan’s Parks Canada Glass Glossary, Lynne Sussman’s The Wheat Pattern, its Archaeological Recording Manual, and many of the technical publications available on the SHA web page.  In January, 2014 the SHA will hold its conference in Quebec City, so it is especially demoralizing to know that by the time we arrive most of Parks Canada’s archaeology staff will have been released.  At the Quebec center, a team of 12 archaeologists was reduced to one; in Cornwall six of seven staff members were eliminated; and just one archaeologist will be responsible for the whole 120,000 km² of the Canadian Arctic.

The SHA has written a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister joining our international colleagues including the Society for American Archaeology who have appealed to the Canadian government to reconsider the scope of these transformations in one of the world’s models for historic preservation, cultural heritage, and historic archaeology.  Let’s hope that by the time we meet in Quebec in January, 2014 the Canadian government will reconsider the breadth and sweep of these changes.

Entrance to the boardwalk at Arcadia Mill (Courtesy of Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site)

Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site in Milton, Florida provides a multi-disciplinary educational experience for people of all ages. Arcadia Mill represents the first and largest water-powered industrial complex in northwest Florida. Between 1828 and 1855, the industrial complex developed into a multi-faceted operation that included two water-powered sawmills, a railroad, bucket factory, shingle mill, textile mill, and an experimental silk cocoonery. In addition to the industrial facilities, Arcadia had an ethnically diverse community populated by enslaved African American laborers, Anglo American workers, and an elite Anglo American management class. In the late 1980s, local awareness and efforts made by the Santa Rosa Historical Society and the University of West Florida helped to save a portion of the Arcadia Mill site from residential development.

Today, Arcadia Mill functions as an archaeological site that is open to the public. Our facilities include an elevated boardwalk with interpretive signage, a newly renovated visitor’s center and museum, and an outdoor pavilion with working replicas. Arcadia hosts thousands of visitors annually including a large number of students on scheduled field trips. Our educational programming at Arcadia has made great strides over the last few years, but we are always looking for new ways to reach our younger audience.

During the summer months when field trips have tapered off, Arcadia hosts a portion of the University of West Florida archaeological field school. This gives our visitors a chance to see an active archaeological dig; however we are missing part of our audience and the opportunity to use the dig as an educational tool for school children. With a little brainstorming, we came up with the first of several steps to take in order to beat the summer time slump.

A year ago we launched a pilot summer camp, Explore Arcadia Mill, as a new way to provide educational programming when school is out of session. The weeklong camp features a multi-disciplinary approach that is designed for upcoming 4^th through 6^th graders. Campers learn about geography, history, archaeology, and historic preservation through lessons that feature hands-on educational crafts, group projects, and outdoor activities. Arcadia Mill is a case study for many of the lessons such as understanding the landscape, how to use historical documents, and how historic preservation has helped to save the site.

Learning about stratigraphy (Courtesy of Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site)

The archaeology portion of the camp involves lessons and activities focused on principles and ethics. The campers learn about fundamental concepts such as the Law of Superposition and then test their knowledge on our stratigraphy canvas. We also teach them about the different tools that archaeologists use followed by a seek-and-find exercise using real photographs from our field school. Once we have completed the introduction to archaeology, the campers are taken to the field school excavations where they can visualize everything they’ve learned. The campers do not participate in the actual field work, but they observe and document the visit in their field books.

Campers visit the field school site to learn more about archaeological excavations (Courtesy of Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site)

The campers really enjoy the archaeology lessons and activities in the classroom, but the crowning achievement is the ability to incorporate an active archaeological dig. Aside from being an excellent visual aid, the ability to visit the field school helps us to educate the campers on ethics, stewardship, and professionalism. At the end of the week the campers combine everything they’ve learned and create a primary document, but for fun sake it is really a scrapbook! The parents or guardians of each camper are invited to come view the scrapbooks and learn about what went on throughout the week. Therefore, the campers become the teachers and the camp directors stand by with pride.

With one successful camp season behind us and another just around the corner, the possibilities for activities and lessons have become endless. The camp was giant lesson for us as professionals since we quickly learned what worked and what didn’t work. It will get much easier with time, but now we are ready to implement additional programming. Where do we go from here? The camp was such a great experience that we are now looking at large scale or year round programming. The idea of an after school program came into question, but is that too much? There’s a fine line between educational programming and babysitting. It would be a large undertaking, but it could be very rewarding and worthwhile. Have you tried an after school program or a similar concept?

Boom baby! Though many archaeologists cringe at its origins, how many times will we hear that catch phrase on our digs this summer? It’s catchy and the show that spawned it, American Diggers, is a hit for SpikeTV. Everything about the show is anathema to professional archaeologists: the destructive excavation methods, lack of concern for context and, especially, the sale of artifacts. But what can you expect from the network that brought you 1000 Ways to Die? So how do we explain National Geographic’s very similar show, Diggers?

National Geographic!?! Aren’t they on our side? They are an organization that has published the most recognizable popular scientific magazine in the world. They have covered and supported thousands of archaeological digs and have several archaeologists on their staff. What happened?

The response from the archaeological community has been immediate and passionate.  People Against National Geographic Channel’s Diggers and Spike’s American Diggers Facebook pages have surfaced with thousands “liking” the message to Stop the Looting.  Professional archaeologists have taken to the media as well with the SAA speaking against the shows to NPR and other professionals speaking out in the St. Augustine Record.  Have they listened? Maybe.

I recently attended a workshop convened by the National Geographic Society to discuss their new show. It seems they were genuinely surprised at the professional outcry over its airing. And, unlike SpikeTV, they were embarrassed and wanted to discuss what might be done. In attendance were professional archaeologists, avocational metal detectorists (AMD), and network and program executives. The discussion that followed was lively, though civil, and is summarized here.

The producers led off the meeting by declaring that the traditional documentary was dead. Only PBS could afford to broadcast an hour-long archaeology program. Commercial television requires more popular subject matter. So, how do you make a show that is both popular AND ethical? There were many suggestions made to make the show more palatable to the archaeologists. The main points were that a concern be shown for location and context, and that the artifacts not be monetarily valued or sold. It was suggested that the show’s AMDs work with real archaeologists, helping them out while abiding by their rules. It has worked elsewhere.  We’ll see what happens.

I think the biggest takeaway that I had from the meeting was how badly we as archaeologists have failed in getting our message out to the general public. Or at least in persuading them as to what our discipline is really all about. It’s more than just finding stuff. It’s the story the stuff has to tell. Our underwater colleagues have seen the public sympathies go out to the treasure salvors. Now it’s the terrestrial archaeologist’s turn to watch the viewing public tune-in to shows that portray archaeology as a lucrative scavenger hunt.

So, what do we do? Write off a large chunk of the population as beyond our reach? Buy an artifact price catalog and sell out to the next network that calls?  Surely there is some middle ground that gets our point across without boring the public to tears? It’s become apparent that these shows are not going away. Paul Mullins and I have both been contacted by producers pitching ideas similar to American Diggers. The calls are worrisome, but I worry more that they will quit calling and produce their shows with no input from us.

Read theTranscript from the meeting with the National Geographic Society.

Globalization, immigration, transformation:

The Society for Historical Archaeology’s 46th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology

January 9-12, 2013 Leicester, Great Britain

If you would like to attract speakers to your proposed symposium by advertising on this blog, please get in touch. We highlighted three sessions last month, and four more can be found below. If you’re interested in participating in a session, please contact the individual session organisers.

Gendering Consumer Choices

Suzanne Spencer-Wood (Oakland University, Michigan; spencerw@oakland.edu)

Chapters in the 1987 edited volume Consumer Choice in Historical Archaeology related consumption to households, family size, composition, life cycle, and occupations and probate inventories of women as well as men. However, the consumer choice framework was not explicitly gendered. Consumer choice is gendered in many ways, such as who selects consumer goods for a household and who consumes goods. Many consumer goods were often manufactured specifically for one gender or another, such as clothing, cosmetics, perfume, jewelry, hats, shoes, watches, scissors, chairs, machines, etc. Papers in this symposium explicitly theorize and analyze a variety of relationships between gender and consumer choice.

Traveling

Julie King (St Mary’s College of Maryland; jking@smcm.edu) and Philip Levy (University of South Florida; plevy@usf.edu)

Phil Levy & I are organizing a session for SHA Leicester focused on traveling; it’s open-ended at this time because the topic is so broad. If you are interested, let us know. Everyday travel, tourism past and present, migration, archaeologist as traveler, travel writing and the experience of place, war as travel… theorizing travel, case studies… any topic focused on the study of travel in some context that takes a material perspective is welcome. So far there are three or four of us. Send us an email if this is of interest and you will be at SHA.

Tearing Down Walls: The Architecture of Household Archaeology

James Nyman (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Jamesnyman16@hotmail.com) and Kevin Fogle (University of South Carolina)

We are organizing an household archaeology session entitled “Tearing Down Walls: The Architecture of Household Archaeology” for the 2013 Society for Historical Archaeology meeting in Leicester. The session seeks presenters who are using innovative household theory or methods. The following is a working abstract for the session:

Household archeology is a methodological and theoretical approach to domestic sites that can address various research interests from demography and socioeconomic relationships to the use of space and the landscape approach. The goal of this session will be to bring together multiple viewpoints regarding the household as a unit of archaeological analysis. We hope to highlight recent developments with household archaeology that improve upon the ways that we traditionally conceptualize how households are made meaningful through activity and as centers for social relationships in the past. We seek a diversity of examples that span temporal and geographic space, and seek to highlight how households are connected to, and influence, multiple processes at the global and local levels.

If this proposed session interests you, please send us an abstract by June 22 2012, or email prior to that date with ideas or questions.

Modern Technology, Past Culture: Emerging Effects of Information Technologies on Archaeological Practice

Edward Gonzalez-Tennant (Monmouth University, Edward.Gonzalez-Tennant@monmouth.edu) and Quentin Lewis (UMass Amherst, quentin@anthro.umass.edu)

Recent advances within information technologies present Historical Archaeologists with an array of novel and unique practices to add to our toolkit. Geographic Information Systems, archaeological visualization, and various web technologies offer the possibility of far-reaching, or even radical changes to the discipline. Rather than accept the inevitability of such practices and techniques as progress, we want to explore the possibilities and pitfalls of the applications of these technologies to historical archaeology. This session’s primary goal is to bring together a group of researchers examining the acquisition, processing, storage, and dissemination of digital archaeological information from a theoretically-focused standpoint. We are less concerned with specific technical procedures and more interested in papers addressing the material, historical, political, and cultural implications such technologies hold for the practice of historical archaeology. As such, we will consider papers for inclusion in our session from any region or time frame, but we ask that they address the following themes:

• — The role of information technologies in transforming the ways archaeologists think about and visualize places, regions, and past cultural processes

• — The ethical and political implications of incorporating information technologies into archaeological practice, both positive and negative.

• — Issues of essentialism and representation which arise at the confluence of archaeology and emerging/emergent technologies.

• — The possibilities or limits of using new information technologies to realize new public archaeologies.

• — The potential of information technologies to construct “new” archaeological data.

Along with exploring new research that connects historical archaeology and information technologies, we hope to engender conversation(s) around the social implications of incorporating these technologies within the archaeological toolkit, as conceived both theoretically and methodologically. Please send your abstract to session organizers by June 15th. We will make our final selections no later than June 20th.

Image: “Muro Occidentale o del Pianto” (Western Wall or Wailing Wall) by Fabio Mauri (1993) CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr

Ed and Judy Jelks with former students, who supported the founding of the award.

All students who are presenting a paper at the 2013 SHA conference in Leicester should consider applying for the Ed and Judy Jelks Student Travel Award. Two $500 awards will be presented to students who are presenting a paper or poster or participating in a symposium at the 2012 conference in Baltimore. Applicants must be currently enrolled in a graduate degree program, be a member of SHA, and be presenting a paper at the 2013 conference. To apply, please send a brief email to me, Charlies Ewen, the Jelks Award committee chair (ewenc@ecu.edu), outlining how participation in the SHA Conference will advance your career and research, and indicate how presentation of your research will benefit other SHA members. Along with this please send your abstract submission and a copy of your curriculum vitae. Reference letters from advisors are not required, but please identify your major advisor(s) in your letter or CV. Award checks will be sent to you after the conference.

The deadline for submissions is November 15th, so please consider applying now if you are a student who is presenting, and please encourage any student advisees or colleagues whose costs would be defrayed by this award. Do email me directly if you have any questions.

To read more about the history of this award, which recognizes the contribution and dedication of Ed and Judy Jelks to the professional development of archaeology students, please visit this recent post by Paul Mullins.