A postphenomenological perspective on digital and algorithmic archaeology

Digital technologies are not neutral tools; rather, they mediate our knowledge of material evidence. This contribution stems from the reflections on the sidelines of the ArchAIDE project, which developed AI tools to recognise ceramics and tries to answer questions, among others, on how technological mediation takes place in archaeology, particularly through AI, and if its effects are disruptive concerning epistemology and hermeneutics. Postphenomenology and material hermeneutics have been considered to describe the relationship between archaeology and digital technology. In the AI age, Archaeology’s challenge is to recognise technology as an actor (or maybe as an agent) on whom we depend on extracting meaning and, at the same time, as something that partially reflects our hermeneutic. The algorithms have digital technological intentionality that creates information, performs hermeneutics instead of us, and finally directs to archaeologists what to read. This act of knowing is performed instead of ours. If, in Heidegger’s ontological inversion, science becomes dependent on technology and, in a sense, a tool of technology, in the same way, archaeology has become dependent on technology and entrapped by it.