ABSTRACT
The ‘material turn’ in history has coincided with an explosion in the quantity and quality of digital sources for material culture available to the historian. This is particularly true of archaeological evidence, which, unlike most historical sources, is constantly refreshed with new information from current fieldwork. The proliferation of online archaeological databases has made it easier for historians interested in materiality to engage with objects that would otherwise have been buried in obscure specialist publications or grey literature. At the same time, however, this ease of access to individual objects can encourage the neglect of their contextual relationships – not only in terms of stratigraphy and assemblage but also in terms of the social contexts that generated the digital records and surrogates for those objects, and the online contexts in which they are integrated or aggregated. This chapter explores those three contextual levels through case studies of three very different online archaeological databases, outlining both the pitfalls and the possibilities such resources create for historical research. Rather than establishing a particular methodology for the use of digital archaeological databases, the chapter highlights issues that the historian should bear in mind while consulting them. The case studies use coins as an interpretive key, since numismatic evidence can be used to good effect at different historical scales, from questions of regional economies to the reconstruction of the contents of an individual’s change-purse. The Open Context digital publication platform (https://opencontext.org) exemplifies the potential for historical insight through data aggregation. The UK’s Portable Antiquities Scheme (https://finds.org.uk/) highlights both data aggregation at a regional scale and the effect of crowdsourcing on the generation of digital archaeological datasets. And on the smallest scale, the database of the Corinth Excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (https://corinth.ascsa.net) offers opportunities for the close reading of both the stratigraphic and the methodological context of a particular object and its digital surrogates. The chapter concludes with some observations on the future of digital material culture in historical research.
