5.1. Response: Living a Semi-digital Kinda Life

The following observations draw on my personal experience as an archaeologist working in the Eastern Mediterranean who has dabbled in the digital world. In considering the papers in this volume, I reflect on what it means to “live a digital life” in field archaeology. I argue we are living a “semi-digital kinda life” (à la Third Eye Blind, the US rock band formed in the early 1990s) where many of us are part paper and part digital, which I contend is not a bad state of affairs. In assessing our half in/half out digital archaeology, I speculate that new technologies have the tendency to create, or reinforce, divisions between genders, developed and less-developed nations, and practice and theory. These thought-provoking chapters illustrate the very bright future for digital archaeological fieldwork and data collection, but there is still work to be done – to improve, expand, and include missing elements into digital archaeology.https://dc.uwm.edu/arthist_mobilizingthepast/1019/thumbnail.jp

Hope in dirt: report of the Fort Apache Workshop on Forensic Sedimentology Applications to Cultural Property Crime, 15—19 October 2018

A 2018 workshop on the White Mountain Apache Tribe lands in Arizona examined ways to enhance investigations into cultural property crime (CPC) through applications of rapidly evolving methods from archaeological science. CPC (also looting, graverobbing) refers to unauthorized damage, removal, or trafficking in materials possessing blends of communal, aesthetic, and scientific values. The Fort Apache workshop integrated four generally partitioned domains of CPC expertise: (1) theories of perpetrators’ motivations and methods; (2) recommended practice in sustaining public and community opposition to CPC; (3) tactics and strategies for documenting, investigating, and prosecuting CPC; and (4) forensic sedimentology—uses of biophysical sciences to link sediments from implicated persons and objects to crime scenes. Forensic sedimentology served as the touchstone for dialogues among experts in criminology, archaeological sciences, law enforcement, and heritage stewardship. Field visits to CPC crime scenes and workshop deliberations identified pathways toward integrating CPC theory and practice with forensic sedimentology’s potent battery of analytic methods