I’d estimate that the differences here are more substantive than the similarities, in the sense that they concern the nature of deity, purpose of humanity, the relationship of God/gods to chaos, and the moral → soteriological dimension. But the similarities are important because they may reflect shared cultural and cosmological motifs of the ancient Near East, which the biblical authors both interacted with and differentiated themselves from.

Week 9 was one of my favourite weeks so far in this course. I found it super engaging and the use of 3D modelling reminded me of my research project. I really enjoyed researching my model and finding out more context regarding it. The biggest challenge I faced while researching my model on sketchfab was diagnosing if it was a genuine model of an object or something created for media purposes like a videogame. My topic involves the Mayan culture and was difficult to distinguish if it was a genuine object. I was able to overcome this by finding a model that was scanned in the British museum and a footprint that could be traced to the actual object. I found it very interesting that through research I was able to assign context to the object by reading about it in Maya: The Yaxchilán Lintels by The British Museum.

Digital archaeology is often about deformance rather than justification

Rather we might concentrate more on discovery and generation, of ‘interesting way[s] of thinking about this’.

By the 1980s desktop computing was becoming sufficiently widespread that the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was feasible for greater numbers of archaeologists. The other ‘killer app’ of the time was computer-aided design, which allowed metric 3-dimensional reconstructions from the plans drawn on site by excavators.

Geospatial, digital and Web-based tools are now central to carrying out archaeological research and to communicating archaeological information in a globalized world.

This puts our volume in dialogue with the work of archaeologists such as Ben Marwick, who makes available with his research, the code, the dependencies, and sometimes, an entire virtual machine, to enable other scholars to replicate, reuse, or dispute his conclusions. We want you to reuse our code, to study it, and to improve upon it. We want you to annotate our pages, point out our errors and make digital practice better. For us, digital archaeology is not the mere use of computational tools to answer archaeological questions more quickly. Rather, we want to enable the audience for archaeological thinking to enter into conversation with us, and to do archaeology for themselves. This is one way to practice inclusivity in archaeology.

Everything we do with our digital devices is underpinned by software driven by innumerable algorithms, which are frequently characterised as invisible, black boxes. Striphas (2015), for example, has argued that our reliance on algorithms constitutes what he calls an 'algorithmic culture', while Bogost (2015) goes further and suggests that we live not so much in an algorithmic culture as a 'computational theocracy' with the invisibility of algorithms giving them a transcendental, almost divine character. In the process, algorithms can become mythologised:

Information flow is reciprocal – we have to set the instrument up correctly over a fixed point and provide it with locational information and the height of the target in order to make the instrument operational. The instrument records horizontal distance and angle, but it is dependent on us to select the location of interest, aim appropriately at the target and trigger the reading. It is also dependent on the staff holder positioning the target correctly over the object of interest, and on both human team members correctly recording any changes in target height. The instrument reports the three-dimensional coordinates back to the user and the process repeats iteratively in the conduct of the survey.

This introduces an essentially asymmetric relationship between human agent and thing rather than the broadly symmetric interaction implicit in the parity principle. In some respects, this might appear to be akin to the distinction between 'primary agency' and 'secondary agency' (for example, Gell 1998, 21) in which, unlike humans, things do not have agency in themselves but have agency given or ascribed to them. However, the increasing assignment of intelligence in digital devices that enables them to act independent of human agents could suggest that some digital cognitive artefacts possess primary agency as they autonomously act on others – both human and non-human/inanimate things. Arguably this agency is still in some senses secondary in that it is ultimately provided via the human programmer even if this is subsequently subsumed within a neural network generated by the thing itself, for example. This is not the place to develop the discussion of thing agency further (for example, see the debate between Lindstrøm (2015), Olsen and Witmore (2015), and Sørensen (2016)); however, the least controversial position to adopt here is to propose that for the most part the agency of digital cognitive artefacts employed by archaeologists complements rather than duplicates through extending and supporting archaeological cognition. They do this, for example, through providing the capability of seeing beneath the ground or characterising the chemical constituents of objects, neither of which are specifically human abilities. So there is considerable scope for considering the nature of the relationship between ourselves as archaeologists and our cognitive artefacts – how do we interact and in what ways is archaeological cognition extended or complemented by these artefacts?

These cognitive artefacts support us in performing tasks that otherwise at best we would have to conduct using more laborious and time-consuming methods (film photography or measured survey using tapes, for instance) or that we would not be able to undertake (we cannot physically see beneath the ground, or determine the chemical constituents of an object, for example). Furthermore, a characteristic of archaeology is the way that we adopt and apply tools and techniques developed in other domains (Schollar 1999, 8; Lull 1999, 381). Consequently, most if not all of the cognitive artefacts used in archaeology are designed outside their discipline of application, meaning we have little or no control over their development and manufacture, and hence their internal modes of operation have to be taken at face value.

We have seen the cost of terrestrial laser scanners come down in recent years, and, perhaps more significantly, the development of the SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transforms) algorithm has seen an explosion in the use of structure from motion photogrammetry as a means of three-dimensional survey using consumer-grade cameras and drones. In the process, we have witnessed changes to the way in which we see the world and capture what we see.