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Short abstract:

The 3D revolution in archeology has produced two different ways of working with digital 3D models in which diverging paradigms have developed distinct approaches to working with 3D with different implications for how archeologists combine experiential and digital data to construct new knowledge.

Long abstract:

The last twenty years have seen 3D documentation and modelling emerge as an important vector for methodological innovation in cutting-edge research in archeology. Adopting techniques such as photogrammetric modelling and laser scanning, archeologists are experimenting with new ways of producing and communicating knowledge; and they do so by innovating and developing new ways to record, report, and reconstruct archeological excavations, finds, and structures in three dimensions. However, the adaptation of these novel technologies has not been without its challenges and questions of standards, best-practices, and sustainable long-term storage linger while innovation keeps moving forward. In this paper, I present the results of a multi-sited ethnographic study of epistemic work and epistemic divides in contemporary archeology and highlight how the adaptation of digital 3D technologies has taken two different paths as two archeological paradigms – the processualists and the post-processualists – have developed diverging strategies for how to incorporate digital 3D into their work. While the processualists foreground the capacity of 3D recording and modelling to produce accurate and precise versions of the world and use 3D to make claims about the pasts they excavate the post-processualists approaches models as spaces with which to reflect on and document the interpretative process underlying their version of knowledge production in archeology. Exploring the differences between the two paradigms’ work with digital 3D technologies in knowledge production, I ask what implications they have for the practical work of digitizing the often embodied, multisensorial experiential data archeologists produce in the field and in the lab.