Cyber-archaeology and Grand Narratives ― Digital Technology and Deep-time Perspectives on Culture Change in the Middle East

This volume asks how the current Information Technology Revolution influences archaeological interpretations of techno-social change. Does cyber-archaeology provide a way to breathe new life into grand narratives of technological revolution and culture change, or does it further challenge these high-level theoretical explanations? Do digital recording methods have the potential to create large, regional-scale databases to ease investigation of high-level theoretical issues, or have they simply exposed deeper issues of archaeological practice that prevent this? In short, this volume cuts beyond platitudes about the revolutionary potential of the Information Technology Revolution and instead critically engages both its possibilities and limitations.

The contributions to this volume are drawn from long-term regional studies employing a cyber-archaeology framework, primarily in the southern Levant, a region with rich archaeological data sets spanning the Paleolithic to the present day. As such, contributors are uniquely placed to comment on the interface between digital methods and grand narratives of long-term techno-social change. Cyber-Archaeology and Grand Narratives provides a much-needed challenge to current approaches, and a first step toward integrating innovative digital methods with archaeological theory.

Thomas E. Levy is Distinguished Professor and holds the Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the Department of Anthropology and Jewish Studies Program, and is director of the Center for Cyber-archaeology and Sustainability at the Qualcomm Institute, California Center of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego and was recently appointed co-director of the new Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Levy is a Levantine field archaeologist with interests in the role of technology, especially early mining and metallurgy, on social evolution from the beginnings of sedentism and the domestication of plants and animals in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (ca. 7500 BCE) to the rise of the first historic Levantine state level societies in the Iron Age (ca. 1200 – 500 BCE) and on to Medieval Islamic times.

Ian W.N. Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses primarily on copper production during the Islamic period in southern Jordan and the economy of the southern Levant in the early 2nd millennium CE. As part of his work with UC San Diego's Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability at the Qualcomm Institute, he is also interested in the integration of spatial technologies such as GIS and satellite remote sensing with traditional archaeological field methods for investigating processes of settlement and landscape change.