Computational Thinking for Archaeologists

I’ve been an archaeologist for over 30 years, and for all of that time I’ve resided comfortably on the far sidelines of technological approaches. In the past several months, however, I’ve accidentally backed into a parallel universe of deep data and the people who are fascinated by its possibilities and challenges — in other words the world of computer science — and it’s changing almost everything that I think about archaeological information and publication. Here’s where I suddenly find myself and how I got here.

So begins a short article by Andrea Berlin, CAS Professor of Archaeology and Fellow of the Hariri Institute, in the new issue of the newsletter of the Center for the Study of Architecture. Her vision of bringing together many fragments of archaeological data–about many fragments of pottery–makes it possible to ask questions of the archaeological record that have historically been hard to answer. The Hariri Institute is pleased to support Prof. Berlin’s work in bringing new computational tools to archaeological research.

Read Prof. Berlin’s full article.