The genealogy industry is also booming (Kramer 2011), with databrokers such as Ancestry.com cashing in on the dead (Booth thisvol.).
The ethical concerns here are fascinating. Sites like ancestry provide meaningful data for families to see their lineage but where do we draw the line when it comes to cashing in on the dead. Also who owns the data of the dead?
The paceof adoption of digitally centred archaeological data and digitally facilitatedarchaeological practice has not been met by the adoption of discipline-widestandards related to archaeological ethics. The result of this mismatch in eth-ics and practice is the creation of archaeologists who utilize digital forms, butwhose archaeology is ungrounded in frameworks that specifically consider theethical burdens of digital tools, methodology, and theory.
This is very interesting, I had never originally considered the implications of ethics when it comes to using digital technologies in archaeology but it is a conversation worth having for sure. Archaeologists are dealing with very precious artefacts and have an ethical code to follow, the previous frameworks have not caught up yet. This is something we are seeing in a lot of different industries as well where the technology is moving faster than policy.
There has alsobeen work on the detection of archaeological sites by combining remote-sensing techniques withmachine learning (e.g., Davis et al. 2021). The ArchAIDE project developed a workflow and anapp that uses automated image recognition to identify and classify ceramic sherds (Anichini et al.2020)
The machine learning applications in archaeology interest me a lot. I think the potential inferences it could make could lead to many advancements we havent experienced yet. Looking forward to discussing this more as the class continues.