ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to provoke colonisation of an intellectual landscape that barely impinges on the horizon of the ‘agency in archaeology’ debate. Specifically, it aims to demonstrate that archaeologists interested in agency stand to benefit from a dialogue with contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI). Not only are the interests of contemporary AI more closely aligned with those of the social sciences than is perhaps widely appreciated, but the conceptual clarity required of AI researchers who seek to construct working models may help archaeologists decide what they want from a concept described by Dobres and Robb (2000: 3) as “an ambiguous platitude meaning everything and nothing”. This is not to claim that AI necessarily holds a monopoly over all that is useful in the debate about agency in archaeology: indeed, it may be that the limitations of contemporary AI research are its most informative aspects. That said, this chapter is intended to support the claim that it would be negligent to dismiss the relevance of AI on the basis of a fifteen-year-old reading of the discipline, or indeed on the basis of a collection of archaeological borrowings which barely touch upon some of the most important developments over that period.
