3D technologies are now standard methods for documenting artefacts and archaeological sites. In order to make the resulting digital cultural heritage accessible to current and future generations, a long-term approach to data management is required, with continuous adjustments and consideration of the changing needs of the users. This is the conclusion of the authors Bonelli and colleagues [1], who present a project in which such a holistic approach was applied in practice.

Introduced is the BitFROST platform (Bridging Research Across Heritage Studies) of the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. This self-hosted platform has been in existence since 2021 and is dedicated to optimising the long-term storage and reuse of 3D data. The project arose from the museum's legal obligations and long tradition of keeping archaeological information usable. The platform was developed with explicit consideration of user feedback to fulfil the different expectations and needs at an early stage. The BitFROST project is therefore a wonderful illustration of how change management should be practised.

The article repeatedly provides brief insights into the functionalities and best practices of the platform but is particularly impressive due to its in-depth contextualisation within the state-of-the-art of digital data management. The authors show a high level of expertise and provide numerous references to further literature. The results of the user feedback are also extensively analysed, and it is explained how, for example, individual technical competence or institutional awareness lead to a great diversity of needs and how this can be counteracted with cooperation, ongoing training and continuous development (as mentioned above).

I recommend this article as a very interesting case study and a well-researched white paper on complex digital data management.

References

Bonelli L., Pantos G. A.s, Indgjerd H., Uleberg E. (2024) Experiences from the BItFROST Project. Zenodo, ver.5 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Archaeology https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8310062

The paper entitled “IT- and machine learning-based methods of classification: The cooperative project ClaReNet – Classification and Representation for Networks” submitted by Chrisowalandis Deligio and colleagues presents the joint efforts of numismatists and data scientists in classifying a large corpus of Celtic coinage. Under the project banner “ClaReNet – Classification and Representation for Networks”, they seek to explore the possibilities and also the limits of new computational methods for classification and representation. This approach seeks to rigorously keep humans in the loop in that insights from Science and Technology Studies inform the way in which knowledge generation is monitored as part of this project. The paper was first developed for a special conference session convened at the EAA annual meeting in 2021 and is intended for an edited volume on the topic of typology, taxonomy, classification theory, and computational approaches in archaeology.

Deligio et al. (2024) begin with a brief and pertinent research-historical outline of Celtic coin studies with a specific focus on issues of classification. They raise interesting points about how variable degrees of standardisation in manufacture – industrial versus craft production, for instance – impact our ability to derive tidy typologies. The successes and failures of particular classificatory procedures and protocols can therefore help inform on the technological contexts of various object worlds and the particularities of human practices linked to their creation. These insights and discussion are eminently case-transferrable and applies not only to coinage, which after all is rather standardised, but to practically all material culture not made by machines – a point that gels particularly well with the contribution by Lucas (2022) to be published in the same volume. Although Deligio et al. do not flag this up specifically, the very expectation that archaeological finds should neatly fall into typological categories likely related to the objects that were initially used by pioneers of the method such as Montelius (1903) to elaborate its basic principles: these were metal objects often produced in moulds and very likely by only a very small number of highly-trained craftspeople such that the production of these objects approached the standardisation seen in industrial times (Nørgaard 2018) – see also Riede’s (2023) contribution due to be published in the same volume.

At the core of Deligio and colleagues’ contribution is the exploration of machine-aided classification that should, via automation, assist in handling the often large numbers of coins available in collections and, at times, from single sites or hoards. Specifically, the authors discuss the treatment of the remarkable coin hoard from Le Câtillon II on Jersey consisting of approximately 70,000 individual Celtic coins. They proceeded to employ several advanced supervised and unsupervised classification methods to process this stupendously large number of objects. Their contribution does not stop there, however, but also seeks to articulate the discussion of machine-aided classification with more theoretically informed perspectives on knowledge production. In line with similar approaches developed in-house at the Römisch-Germanische Kommission (Hofmann 2018; Hofmann et al. 2019; Auth et al. 2023), the authors also report on their cutely acronymed PANDA (Path Dependencies, Actor-Network and Digital Agency) methodology, which they deploy to reflect on the various actors and actants – humans, software, and hardware – that come together in the creation of this new body of knowledge. This latter impetus of the paper thus lifts the lid on the many intricate, idiosyncratic, and often quirky decisions and processes that characterise research in general and research that brings together humans and machines in particular – a concrete example of the messiness of knowledge production that commonly remains hidden behind the face of the published book or paper but which science studies have long pointed at as vital components of the scientific process itself (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Galison 1997; Shapin and Schaffer 2011). In this manner, the present contribution serves as inspiration to the many similar projects that are emerging right now in demonstrating just how vital a due integration of theory, epistemology, and method is as scholars are forging their path into a future where few if any archaeological projects do not include some element of machine-assistance. 

References

Auth, Frederic, Katja Rösler, Wenke Domscheit, and Kerstin P. Hofmann. 2023. “From Paper to Byte: A Workshop Report on the Digital Transformation of Two Thing Editions.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8214563

Deligio, Chrisowalandis, Caroline von Nicolai, Markus Möller, Katja Rösler, Julia Tietz, Robin Krause, Kerstin P. Hofmann, Karsten Tolle, and David Wigg-Wolf. 2024. “IT- and Machine Learning-Based Methods of Classification: The Cooperative Project ClaReNet – Classification and Representation for Networks.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13304085

Galison, Peter Louis. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hofmann, Kerstin P. 2018. “Dingidentitäten Und Objekttransformationen. Einige Überlegungen Zur Edition von Archäologischen Funden.” In Objektepistemologien. Zum Verhältnis von Dingen Und Wissen, edited by Markus Hilgert, Kerstin P. Hofmann, and Henrike Simon, 179–215. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World 59. Berlin: Edition Topoi. https://dx.doi.org/10.17171/3-59

Hofmann, Kerstin P., Susanne Grunwald, Franziska Lang, Ulrike Peter, Katja Rösler, Louise Rokohl, Stefan Schreiber, Karsten Tolle, and David Wigg-Wolf. 2019. “Ding-Editionen. Vom Archäologischen (Be-)Fund Übers Corpus Ins Netz.” E-Forschungsberichte des DAI 2019/2. E-Forschungsberichte Des DAI. Berlin: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. https://publications.dainst.org/journals/efb/2236/6674

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Laboratory Life : The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Lucas, Gavin. 2022. “Archaeology, Typology and Machine Epistemology.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7622162

Montelius, Gustaf Oscar Augustin. 1903. Die Typologische Methode. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wicksell.

Nørgaard, Heide Wrobel. 2018. Bronze Age Metalwork: Techniques and Traditions in the Nordic Bronze Age 1500-1100 BC. Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology.

Riede, Felix. 2023. “The Role of Heritage Databases in Typological Reification: A Case Study from the Final Palaeolithic of Southern Scandinavia.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8372671

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 2011. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The paper by Xanthopoulos and colleagues [1] presents an approach to establish a pipeline for the analysis of osteological and biochemical data. This approach integrates novel data collection, FAIR principles for data longevity and accessibility, utilises R markdown and cloud webware. Following the changes recommended by the reviewers this paper presents a welcome contribution to osteoarcheology and bioarchaeology.

Osteoarchaeology and bioarchaeology often involves the collection of vast amounts of data both in the field and from consequential analysis in the lab. From this data we can reconstruct many aspects of past human experiences. However, issues often arise when bringing together these diverse types of data. In this regard, this paper proposes are useful methodology in which osteoarchaeological researchers can bring their data together as part of a streamlined process, from data collection to analyses. 

References

[1] Xanthopoulos, K., Georgiadou, A. and Papageorgopoulou, C. (2024). An approach to establishing a workflow pipeline for synergistic analysis of osteological and biochemical data. The case study of Amvrakia in the context of Corinthian colonisation between 625-189 BC in Epirus, Greece. Zenodo, 11156506, ver. 3 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8298579

“Hypercultural types: archaeological objects in fast times” by A. Ribeiro (1) offers some timely, critical and creative reflections on the manifold struggles of and disappointments in type-thinking and typological approaches in recent archaeological scholarship. Ribeiro insightfully situates what has been identified as a “crisis” in archaeological typo-praxis in the historical conditions of postmodernity and late capitalism themselves. The author thereby attempts what he himself considers “quite hard”, namely “to understand the current Zeitgeist and how it affects how we think and do archaeology” (p. 4). This provides a sort of historical epistemology of the present which can of course only be preliminary and incomplete as it crystallizes, takes shape, and transforms as we write these lines, is available only in fragments and hints, and is generally difficult to talk about and describe as we (the author included) lack critical distance – present-day archaeologists and fellow academics are both enfolded in postmodernity and continue to contribute to its logics and trajectories. Ribeiro’s key argument is provocative as it is interesting: he contends that archaeologists’ difficulties of coming to terms with types and typologies – staple knowledge practices of the discipline ever since – are a symptom of the changing cultural matrix of our times. 

The diagnosis is multilayered and complex, and Ribeiro at times only scratches the surface of what may be at stake here as he openly admits himself. At the core of his proposal is a shift in attention away from classical questions of epistemological rank, which in archaeology have tended to orbit the contentious issue of the reality of types (see also 2). Instead of foregrounding the question of type-realities – whether types, once identified, can be meaningfully said to exist and to represent something significant in the world – archaeologists are urged to recognize that typo-praxis is culturally saturated in at least two profound ways. First, devising and mobilizing types and typologies is a cultural practice itself – it may indeed have long been a foundational ‘cultural technique’ (Kulturtechnik) (3) of archaeology as a disciplined community-venture of methodical knowledge production. Typo-centric understandings of the archaeological record are quite akin to definition-centric apprehensions of the same as in both cases order, discreteness, and one-to-one correspondence are considered overriding epistemic virtues and credible pointers to a subject-independent “reality”. As such, these practices have a location of their own and they may thus notably conflict with the particularities of alternate and ever-mutating phenomenal realities and historical conditions. Discreteness may for instance lose its paradigmatic status as a descriptor of worldly order, and this is precisely what Ribeiro argues to have happened in the wake of postmodern transformations, influentially said to have deeply reconfigured the relation between the local and the global, at times even superseding such distinctions altogether. When coupled to questions of reality, types, in a similar fashion as definitions, quickly become vehicles to affirm epistemic power and knowledge authority and so help certify certain kinds of realities while supressing others. This is the paradox of modernity: to insist on monolithic understandings of the world while professing radical difference. 

Second, and for Ribeiro more importantly, typo-praxis is not just subject to cultural variation and thus by implication is plural, it also always has its proper associated cultural milieu in which it exerts some sort of efficacy, i.e. enables action and insight. Ribeiro maintains that this sort of efficacy has become contentious under postmodern conditions and this is because culture, under the gaze of global consumerism, has lost much of its classical significance, and as “hyperculture” (4) developed new logics, significations, and material culture correspondences, essentially “flattening” the highly textured and differentiated world of modernity (p. 6). Some of these new configurations sharply violate the expectations of traditional views of culture. The postmodern situation has in this way effectively emerged as a resistant force proffering much caution and growing scepticism among archaeologists and other academics alike as received ideas about “types” and “cultures” do not seem to work anymore the same way as before. The credibility of different modes of typo-praxis, archaeological or not, in other words, may depend much more on the cultural ecology of lived experience and contemporary diagnosis than is often realized. With Ribeiro, we may say that culture concepts and type concepts are indeed co-constitutive, and what sort of types and typologies archaeologists can persuasively deploy thus also depends greatly on how we construct the link between culture and type, and how (well) we grapple with our own realities and the lessons we draw from them – yet another important reminder of how our own subjectivities figure in such foundational debates (see esp. 5).

The crisis of typo-praxis in archaeology, then, is intricately linked to the crisis of modernity, broached by Ribeiro with the labels of postmodernity and late capitalism. Upon reflection, this is not surprising at all since Tylor’s (6) influential definition of culture for example, which is extensively referenced in the paper, was both reflective of and conducive to the project of modernity and its distinctive historical formations such as empire and colonialism. Ribeiro reminds us that questions of justification and credibility, be it in the domain of type-thinking or other epistemic contexts, can never be fully divorced from the contemporary situation, and archaeologists thus need to be vigilant observers of the present, too. Typo-praxis ultimately is motivated by and draws authority from what Foucault (7) has called épistémè, the totality of pertinent parameters forming the historical a priori of understanding or the guiding unconsciousness of subjectivity within a given epoch. The crisis of archaeological typo-praxis, in this view, signifies a calling into question of the historical a priori on which much traditional type-work in archaeology was premised. Archaeologists still have to come to terms with the implications and consequences of this assessment. “Hypercultural types: archaeological objects in fast times” offers a first poignant analysis of some of these challenges of postmodern archaeological type-thinking.

Bibliography

1. Ribeiro, A. (2024). Hypercultural types: archaeological objects in fast times. Zenodo, 10567441, ver. 3 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10567441

2. Hussain, S. T. (2024). The Loss of Typological Innocence: An Archaeology of Archaeological Typo-Praxis. Zenodo, 10567441. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10547264

3.  Macho, T. (2013). Second-Order Animals: Cultural Techniques of Identity and Identification. Theory, Culture & Society 30, 30–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413499189

4. Han, B.-C. (2022). Hyperculture: culture and globalization (Polity Press).

5. Frank, A., Gleiser, M. and Thompson, E. (2024). The blind spot: why science cannot ignore human experience (The MIT Press). https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/13711.001.0001

6. E. B. Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (J. Murray).

7.  Foucault, M. (2007). The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences, Repr (Routledge).

The paper “A return to function as the basis of lithic classification” by Radu Iovita (2024) is a contribution to an upcoming volume on the role of typology and type-thinking in current archaeological theory and praxis edited by the PCI recommenders. In this context, the paper offers an in-depth discussion of several crucial dimensions of typological thinking in past and current lithic studies, namely:

• “common sense” in archaeology, discussed based on earlier proposals by influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1975),
• “function”, argued by the author to be the “fundamental property of tools”,
• “cognitive” aspects, said to be reflected in the “property we naturally use to classify” stone tools and then argued to be grounded in function,
• “traceology” as an archaeological bundle of methods and practices to determine (tool) function, discussing the current status of this research perspective in archaeology and its future.

Discussing and importantly re-articulating these concepts, Iovita ultimately aims at “establishing unified guiding principles for studying a technology that spans several million years and several different species whose brain capacities range from ca. 300–1400 cm³”.

The notion that tool function should dictate classification is not new (e.g. Gebauer 1987). It is particularly noteworthy, however, that the paper engages carefully with various relevant contributions on the topic from non-Anglophone research traditions. First, its considering works on lithic typologies published in other languages, such as Russian (Sergei Semenov), French (Georges Laplace), and German (Joachim Hahn). Second, it takes up the ideas of two French techno-anthropologists, in particular: 

• Anthropologist of technics François Sigaut's (1940-2012) distinction of form, function, and “fonctionnement” (Sigaut 1991). Iovita proposes to draw and recast this tripartition, splitting the notion of function into “structural function” (a concept encompassing biological function as well as the “interface between the tool and its environment”), “operation” (which “relates to learning the function of artifacts from others and representing them through their motor associations”), and "designer-intended function” (DIF). Iovita shows how these distinctions can be used to clarify the ways and the grounds on which we build lithic typologies.
• Structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss' (1908-2009) concept of “bricolage”, influentially proposed and developed in his La pensée sauvage (Lévi-Strauss 1962); this concept was also much discussed by North American anthropologist Clifford Geertz and more recently critically re-considered in the English-speaking literature thanks to a new translation of Lévi-Strauss' original text (Lévi-Strauss 2021).

Interestingly, Iovita grounds his argumentation on insights from primatology, psychology and the cognitive sciences, to the extent that they fuel discussion on archaeological concepts and methods. Results regarding the so-called “design stance” for example play a crucial role: coined by philosopher and cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942-2024), this notion encompasses the possible discrepancies between the designer’s intended purpose and the object's current functions. DIF, as discussed by Iovita, directly relates to this idea, illustrating how concepts from other sciences can fruitfully be injected into archaeological thinking.

Lastly, readers should note the intellectual contents generated on PCI as part of the reviewing process of the paper itself: both the reviewers and the author have engaged in in-depth discussions on the idea of (tool) “function” and its contested relationship with form or typology, delineating and mapping different views on these key issues in lithic study which are worth reading on their own.

References

Gebauer, A. B. (1987). Stylistic Analysis. A Critical Review of Concepts, Models, and Interpretations, Journal of Danish Archaeology, 6, p. 223–229.

Geertz, C. (1975). Common Sense as a Cultural System, The Antioch Review, 33 (1), p. 5–26.

Iovita, R. (2024). A return to function as the basis of lithic classification. Zenodo, 7734147, ver. 5 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7734147

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962). La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (2021). Wild Thought: A New Translation of “La Pensée sauvage”. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman & John Leavitt. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Sigaut, F. (1991). “Un couteau ne sert pas à couper, mais en coupant. Structure, fonctionnement et fonction dans l'analyse des objets” in 25 Ans d'études technologiques en préhistoire : Bilan et perspectives, Juan-les-Pins: Éditions de l'association pour la promotion et la diffusion des connaissances archéologiques, p. 21-34.