Abstract
The availability and accessibility of digital data are increasingly significant in the creation of archaeological knowledge with, for example, multiple datasets being brought together to perform extensive analyses that would not otherwise be possible. However, this makes capturing the silences in those data—what is absent as well as present, what is unknown as well as what is known—a critical challenge for archaeology in terms of the suitability and appropriateness of data for subsequent reuse. This paper reverses the usual focus on knowledge and considers the role of ignorance—the lack of knowledge, or nonknowledge—in archaeological data and knowledge creation. Examining aspects of archaeological practice in the light of different dimensions of ignorance, it proposes ways in which the silences, the range of unknowns, can be addressed within a digital environment and the benefits which may accrue.
Highlights
A new scientific paradigm in archaeology has recently been characterized: from Kristiansen’s “Third Science Revolution” [1], through Sørensen’s “Scientific Turn” and its “new empiricism” [2] (p. 101), to Cunningham and MacEachern’s discussion of archaeology’s aspiration to become “big science” [3] (p. 630), for example
In this way a focus on knowledge and the knowable promotes the primacy of data and the authority of “facts”, and Sørensen argues that this new empiricism raises a number of challenges, not least in the way in which it “ . . . generates an unhelpful return to the ethos of letting ‘data speak for itself’ . . . because . . . ‘facts do not lie’ and become associated with ‘truth’” and a “perceived need to force scientific methods onto otherwise ambiguous archaeological research topics . . . ” [2] (p. 102);
The rise of new empiricism combined with the growth of datafication in archaeology makes it an appropriate time to reconsider our approach to archaeological knowledge and its shadowy data [11]
Summary
A new scientific paradigm in archaeology has recently been characterized: from Kristiansen’s “Third Science Revolution” [1] (pp. 12-14), through Sørensen’s “Scientific Turn” and its “new empiricism” [2] (p. 101), to Cunningham and MacEachern’s discussion of archaeology’s aspiration to become “big science” [3] (p. 630), for example. 33-34) characterizes archaeological data in terms of their temporal and spatial dimensions, their high degree of variability, their multidisciplinary nature, their preferentially textual focus, the vagueness of cognitive processes associated with reasoning around data, and limited studies about the visualization of data and the effects on knowledge generation. None of these characteristics should be a surprise to archaeologists, they emphasize the complexities of archaeological data in relation to knowledge creation, underlined by Wylie’s description of archaeology as a discipline defined by the challenges of working with gaps and absences in its primary data [11] The rise of new empiricism combined with the growth of datafication in archaeology makes it an appropriate time to reconsider our approach to archaeological knowledge and its shadowy data [11]
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