Thinking beyond the tool

At last year’s Theoretical Archaeology Group a session titled ‘Thinking beyond the tool’ was held, chaired by the university’s Costas Papadopoulos, Angeliki Chrysanthi and Patricia Murrieta Flores. The sessions aimed to move beyond simple archaeological applications of computational techniques and reflect on the theoretical implications involved. The themes covered included augmented reality, 3D reconstructions, photo-realism, social network analysis and databases. The proceedings of this session are now available as a book published with Archaeopress as part of the British Archaeological Reports series. Costas, Angeliki and Patricia did a great job editing this volume consisting of many fascinating papers, big congratulations to them!

Here is what Patricia has to say about the volume on her blog:

The idea of putting together this book was inspired by the session ‘Thinking beyond the Tool: Archaeological Computing and the Interpretive Process’, which was held at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference in Bristol (17-19 December 2010). The book postulates that archaeological computing has become an integral part of the interpretive process for inquiring and disseminating the past and includes:

12 theoretically informed chapters on a variety of computational methodologies used in archaeology and heritage
an introduction by the editors (Costas Papadopoulos, Angeliki Chrysanthi and myself)
a commentary by Jeremy Huggett
The book will be out by the end of March and those of you coming to the CAA2012 keep an eye for it at the Archaeopress stand! Many thanks to all those – both authors and reviewers- who have contributed to this!