ABSTRACT
Two topics that have long been the focus of my archaeological interest form the context for this essay. Both topics focus on the intimate connections, often unrecognised, between media and information design and management. The first topic is archaeological method, how we move from the collection of data through description, explanation, and interpretation. My argument is that our orthodox archaeological methods – traditional, processual, and post-processual – have a tendency to predetermine the past, what we notice, gather, and say; they may even actually obscure the past. The second topic is the very way we think about archaeology. I argue that archaeologists work on what is left of the past; we do not discover the past. We set up relationships with what remains.
