An encounter with the dark side of technology...or the dark side of archaeology?

For the past couple of weeks our class has been learning to use Microsoft Access and Excel to manipulate cemetery data. What started off seeming like a fairly innocent assignment turned into what Lou from Little Britain might describe as a “right kerfuffle” (wow kerfuffle is in Microsoft Word’s dictionary; isn’t technology grand?). Although this assignment caused me considerable frustration and much more time than I had originally anticipated some good things and some important points came out of it.

 This was my first time using Access and while I struggled with it being less ‘first-time user friendly’ than many other Microsoft programs such as Excel (although even my old friend Excel steered me wrong once or twice on this assignment); I found it to be a very valuable exercise. For one thing we live in the age of technology and keeping up with current technology is essential particularly for undergraduates who are soon going to be entering the workforce. While technological innovation is not always better it is important to accept when technology can be useful to you and figure out how to take advantage of it. I mean imagine if people living in the late Bronze Age had refused to learn the new iron ore smelting technology just because it was complicated! 

But I digress, getting back on topic I actually found the database we were using (Evergreen Cemetery) to be quite a useful and innovative idea. Creating a digital record of the cemetery makes it accessible to a much wider audience. I think too often archeology in the past has been inaccessible to the general public even though it is everyone’s history and everyone should theoretically have access to it. Popular understanding of archaeological discovery is often mediated through sensationalized stories (such as the “Gay Caveman", who was likely neither ‘gay’ nor a caveman) which do not accurately reflect the data or interpretations that can reasonably be made. In recent years some archaeologists have begun to take part in publishing their work in ways that are much more accessible to the general public than scholarly articles. Some excellent websites have been created for archeological sites such as the one for Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site located in modern-day Turkey. So thank you to the archaeologists who are taking advantage of recent technology to bring their data and findings to a broader audience!

Here are the links for the cemetery database and the site for Çatalhöyük:

http://projectpast.org/gvogel/Evergreen/Evergreen.html

http://www.catalhoyuk.com/