Archaeology From Behind the Computer Screen
Olivia Golubowski, 2021 Platt Summer Stipend Recipient
Most people who envision the practice of archaeology find themselves imagining what is colloquially called “the field:” perhaps a desert, perhaps a jungle, perhaps even underwater, but most certainly some aspect of the natural world in which one would hope to find material remains of the human past. Very few, I imagine, would picture the blinding artificial brightness of a computer screen—yet this summer, this was exactly where I found myself practicing the discipline, with my cat sitting in my lap and the comfort of air conditioning close by.
Aerial view of Arad Early Bronze Age town from the southwest. (Courtesy of Matthew J. Adams, ñ Photo Collection)
I was lucky enough to be able to work with Dr. Zachary Dunseth on the site of Tel Arad, Israel, all the while from behind my computer screen in Marlton, New Jersey. Instead of a trowel in my hands, my trusted tools were a variety of geographic information system programs, including ArcMap and QGIS. I wasn’t uncovering artifacts, but rather evaluating that which had already been excavated, and my work was like nothing I had expected out of archaeology. Rather than recording finds as they were discovered, I took such records and processed them into something which could be interpreted, manipulated, and above all, accessible.
My work started with plans—lots, lots, and lots of plans, all incredibly large and detailed. Physical copies stretched longer across than I was tall, and together, Zach and I began the tedious process of scanning portions of the plans into digital images and then ‘stitching’ the images together via Photoshop to incorporate them once more into the massive plans they physically were. This process might’ve been a bit grueling, especially when a scan didn’t go well or just the tiniest sliver of one portion was missing—but the real challenge, I soon learned, was yet to come.
I was lucky enough to have taken a class in geographic information systems about a semester before beginning my work with Zach, and in that class, I had discovered the joys of georectification, along with the sweet satisfaction of getting a file in just the right spot, with every feature accurately represented spatially. I was about to discover the other, uglier side of georectification: endless calculations, fighting with numbers, and, worst of all, dealing with that one most excruciating aspect of legacy archaeological plans—hand-drawn human error.
Examples of Olivia’s work georectifying the Tel Arad plans.
Needless to say, the process of georectification was not a perfectly smooth one—yet in the end, despite the headaches the computer screen caused and the agony of thinking ‘maybe it will work this time’ only to find that it certainly did not work, I don’t think I would have had it any other way. The work I did was difficult. I balanced human error, miscalculated calculations, stubborn software, and my computer’s ever-decreasing storage space—but by the end of my work, when I was able to upload each and every archaeological plan, georeferenced to the very best of my ability, to our shared Dropbox folder, I felt like the happiest archaeologist on the face of the earth. I had done something which, at times, seemed impossible—and despite my own preconceptions about the way archaeology was ‘supposed’ to work, I had done it all from behind a screen.
Olivia is currently a junior studying biological anthropology and archaeology at Brown University. Her academic interests include mortuary archaeology, geographic information systems, and paleoanthropology. Outside of academics, she enjoys spending time with her little brother, dancing, watching Star Wars, and above all else, her cat.