ABSTRACT
When called to conduct a short rescue excavation ahead of sand extraction at a small quarry in Eastern Yorkshire in 1977 I had no idea that I would ultimately undertake a barely-funded project (in what at first glance was one of the bleakest places I had ever visited) or that I would still be working there 35 years later. I certainly had no idea that less than 5 years later a large van would pull up outside the 12th Century house (hovel) that I lived in and deliver the many boxes that made up a Wang 2000 computer with 8K of in-box memory. That computer, which like so many of its successors joined the techno-scrapheap in an annoyingly small time, was the instrument that I first learned to program and which triggered the idea that this ‘new’ technology might have something to offer field archaeology. During the early years of applied computing in archaeology our work as archaeologists was constrained by the limitations and need to make it ‘fit’ the available technology. However, in the last few years this situation has become completely reversed and now we have the freedom to ‘bend the technology to our will’. In my case that has been the search for the ‘real archaeology’, how much stuffis out there, and when is enough, enough? What do we actually need to know before we can even think of asking or better answering difficult questions, and how do we secure the knowledge infrastructure required to process the archaeological ‘theory’ that now seemingly ‘dominates’ our much maligned field discipline? This paper will examine not so much the toys and software but the process of discovery and delivery of landscape-scale data from the individual grave to a complete landscape in 3D and 4D, and the urgency with which we must work if it is not all to be a waste of time. Along the way it will reflect upon aspects of past, current and future research and the role of applied computing in improving and enhancing rather than simply replacing the observational, recording and delivery infrastructure which has for so long been the subject of site-hut and bar-room discussion.
