Abstract
Project Eliseg involved three field seasons (2010�12) of survey and excavation at the multi-period mortuary and commemorative monument known as the Pillar of Eliseg, near Llangollen, Denbighshire, Wales. Each season incorporated an evolving range of media and public engagement activities, with digital media employed to disseminate ongoing work both globally and locally, including to those unable to access the site during the excavation seasons. One of the key strategies employed via digital media in seasons 2 and 3 was a daily video-blog (hereafter: vlog). This article presents and appraises the rationale, design, content and reception of the Project Eliseg vlog revealing key lessons in the use of digital media in archaeological fieldwork, particularly for those engaged with the archaeology of death, burial and commemoration.
Highlights
Within the broad and varied scope of digital public engagement with archaeology, blogs — interactive multiple-entry discussion sites on the World Wide Web (Austin 2014)— are becoming a widespread ingredient of archaeological field-based research supporting its dissemination and public engagement
Blogging can be used in conjunction with a range of other digital media, including both social media and project websites, to circulate fresh discoveries and interim results, as well as to outline theoretical questions, the background and history of previous research, aims and objectives and the methods and techniques employed (Morgan and Eve 2012)
Evaluating the vlogs is difficult because it is unclear what criteria we are evaluating them against: each archaeology project has different aims, different scales and a different relationship between its research, training and public engagement components
Summary
Within the broad and varied scope of digital public engagement with archaeology, blogs — interactive multiple-entry discussion sites on the World Wide Web (Austin 2014)— are becoming a widespread ingredient of archaeological field-based research supporting its dissemination and public engagement. At the time of the development of Project Eliseg (2009–2010), there were few examples of the specific use of the vlog (as a distinctive sub-type of the project blog) by other archaeological fieldwork projects as an integral part of their outreach strategies. In Wales, the Cosmeston archaeology project had already made innovative use of a wide range of social media to communicate its discoveries, including Facebook, Google+, Storify and Twitter, as well as videos summarising the archaeological work on YouTube (see Richardson 2012). There has been a gradual increase in the use of vlogging during projects and project summary videos, notably the community-based Low Hauxley project in Northumberland, which was set up to excavate Mesolithic remains and a Bronze Age cairn eroded by the sea in 2013.
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