Digital technology, for example, whatever its integrative potential, relies, in part, on the industrialist and Taylorist approach of dividing complex tasks into rather more simple ones.
Some technologies yes, others not so much. For example, I think you can make this argument for databases more readily than you can for digitally sketching.
“Slow archaeology,” despite its grounding in privilege, nevertheless offers an ideal archaeological future that challenges the expectations of efficiency. Fi
As I think we've exchanged on previously, in my experience digital archaeology does not equal fast archaeology.
I recognize that by following the logic of Ellul, Illich, and other anti-modernists, I am predisposed to focus on the use of remote, structured or simplified recording digital recording interfaces, the ease of point-and-click data manipulation, or the use of software to synthesize unstructured data such as generated by digital photography into 3D structure-from-motion images (Morgan and Knight 2017)
I'd encourage you to think about the introduction of e.g. CNNs in relation to this, as I think they trend in the opposite direct of 'ease of data manipulation' and simplification.
In this context, the rather linear practice of stratigraphic excavation with its institutional, disciplinary, and performative underpinnings gives way to the raucous and uneven performance of punk rock music which often eschews expertise, barriers to access, and specialized knowledge (see Gnecco 2013)
I like to think of the practice of stratigraphic excavation as our attempt to rein in the chaos that inevitably results as we are continually faced with and misunderstand the remains of the past. I would argue that disciplined stratigraphic excavation and a punk spirited practice are not entirely incompatible. You can rebel against the system in every aspect of your practice as long as you stand in the dole queue (and fill out your paperwork and context sheets properly). This may be slightly off your main argument.
On the other hand, this work has only just begun, I suspect, to inform the thriving conversation on the impact of digital tools on the organization of archaeological practice (although see Pickering 1995; Taylor et al. 2018), the nature of archaeological skills and expertise, and issues of archaeological preservation and publication (Huggett 201
Indeed. On the AI front, I'm hopeful (always dangerous in relation to technology) that the digital tools will push us as practitioners to be more creative, and to interrogate the reasoning behind many of our assumptions about our perception, recognition and description of material in which we are supposedly expert.
but one that is increasingly bereft of the conditions that allow for creativity as the need for efficiency and speed create a kind of dominant logic in practic
Is there space for the argument that technology and efficiency make more space for creative practice by making the dull bits go quickly? Didn't Russell have something to say about this?
lacked
I think you mean packed, but I am enjoying the typo.
as individual choices in how to work gave way to the inescapable logic of efficiency as the organizing principle structuring all human relations and relationships between humans and their tools.
I've always had an issue with this formulation. There is technique and then there is the execution of that technique. The latter remains individual. In basic archaeological terms, there is good efficient pickaxing technique, and then there is your execution of that technique.