Tobias Olofsson

The transformation of complex spatial and temporal patterns into mapped and recorded archaeological data requires archaeologists to translate temporally non-distinct processes of exploration into a series of visual recordings of distinct moment of discovery. These visual records, produced by articulating key moments in the excavation process as cleaned and documentable contexts and finds, form a collage of multitemporal evidence entangled, first, to other contexts articulated previously and later in an excavation, and second, to a category of temporally distant past of which it is said to be a record. These practices of temporal and contextual alienation, which isolate parts of a processes to construct collages of moments frozen in time, echoes the loss of authenticity, or aura, that Walter Benjamin recognized as a consequence of the mechanical reproduction of art. However, while Benjamin understood mechanical reproduction to lead to the removal of art’s historical anchorage in magic and religious rituals, which had previously granted it its meaning, the alienation required to translate moments in and archaeological excavation into stabilized data takes a different form: the reproduction of context as data. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with archaeologists working at the cutting edge of digital data recording, this paper explores the visual and epistemological practices involved in translating context into archaeological data and what happens to context and complexity when individual moments of archaeological exploration become decontextualized and later recontextualized as recorded data out of time and out of place.