Big Data in Archaeology
Chris Green · 2023
Big Data has become an increasingly cited buzzword in archaeological research over the past decade. Archaeology is a discipline than spans both the sciences and the humanities/social sciences/arts: various departments of archaeology at UK universities fall under the remit of all of these different divisions. This chapter looks at some of the projects that have or could claim to have conducted Big Data archaeological research up until the time of writing in late 2019. Visualization is the task of translating information into human-perceptible form, easing understanding through the enhancement of visual perception/cognition. Spatial binning is widely used in sciences such as biology/zoology and has been regularly used in archaeology to plot the results of field-walking surveys. Fundamental to the practice of Big Data analytics in archaeology is the construction, adaptation, and maintenance of workflows that allow the efficient processing and interpretation of large datasets.