What Next for Archaeological Representation?: Towards a creative practice of digital archaeology.

Part 1 - Towards a Creative Practice of Digital Archaeology

During the past thirty years, digital media work has become increasingly integrated into archaeological practice. This has taken diverse forms including technical digital imaging, remote sensing, 3D animation, digital drawing, and photography. Increasingly however, the scope and range of this work has diversified beyond the limits of conventional archaeological practice to include a wide range of distinctively archaeological approaches to sound work, film work, interactive media, games production, and even performance. Amidst this proliferation a digital creative practice of archaeology has started to emerge with significant, and as yet poorly understood, implications for the methodological, theoretical and epistemological character of the discipline. In this paper we present an examination of emerging cultures and practices of digital creativity and demonstrate that this new expansive, experimental, and poorly understood area of work has the potential to transform archaeology as a discipline and show that in many areas, it has already begun to do so.

We achieve this through an analysis of the current state of creative digital archaeological work and through an auto-ethnographic and auto-biographical analysis of our own work over the past two decades (Earl et al. 2008, Beale et al 2013, Beale & Beale 2015, Beale & Reilly 2017, Beale & Smith 2017, Jones & Smith 2017, Smith, Beale et al. 2021, Beale, 2024, Smith 2024). During this period, each of the authors has developed a distinct form of experimental archaeological practice using digital media and technologies and built a community of practice which extends across and far beyond archaeology. As such, we are uniquely well placed, not just to advocate for the value of our own work, but to present an overview of the complex, entangled and extremely vibrant ecosystem of digital creativity in archaeology. This paper represents the primary theoretical output of these two decades of work and is intended to signpost a future for digital archaeological representation which acknowledges the value and potential of creative practice. More than this, the paper argues that archaeology must learn from cultures of creative practice if we are to fully understand and realise the potential impacts of our discipline across the broader political, cultural, economic landscape in which we work.

This paper benefits the discipline via an agenda-setting vision for the future of archaeological representation within which creative digital practice is fully integrated into archaeological practice. This will result in archaeological work which is: a) genre-crossing, cooperative, and collaborative, and acknowledges the importance of creative digital practice as vital to archaeological practice, and b) the incorporation of distinct forms of knowledge which emerge from creative digital practice into mainstream archaeological epistemologies.

We have written this paper for all researchers within Archaeology, particularly those seeking to develop creative practice as a form of archaeological research. We hope that it will be of particular interest to emerging archaeologists, as they develop their own distinctive and creative approaches to archaeological practice. For artists and practitioners seeking to collaborate or develop an archaeological practice, this paper provides a critical account of some significant structural opportunities and weaknesses within archaeology which are in need of expertise and further work. This paper will be of use beyond archaeology to researchers engaging in, or planning to engage in, practice-led and practice-based research, particularly in disciplines where these approaches are less common or have been marginalised.

Introduction

Digital representation in archaeology is no longer new and it is no longer unusual. As others have identified, digital forms of practice have been normalised and incorporated into the discipline to such an extent that the value of even considering a ‘digital archaeology’ as something distinct from the broader field of archaeological thought or practice has become questionable (Huvila, 2018; Morgan, 2022). As digital media have become increasingly normalised, they have been the subject of less critical attention. The early literature of digital archaeological representation which frequently emphasised uniqueness, newness and transformational potential of digital media feel increasingly anachronistic. These claims to uniqueness made loudly and frequently, particularly in relation to those technologies such as 3D Computer Graphics or Geographical Information Systems, which looked interesting or unusual when compared to their closest analogue antecedents, were not unproblematic. The ‘fetishisation’ of digital technologies and the creation of discrete communities of expertise specialising in digital archaeology (Huggett, 2004), served to abrade potentially informative links between emerging digital and extant forms of analogue archaeological practice. It also led to the tacit incorporation of theoretical and practical assumptions, which were engineered into the hardware and software being used, into archaeological work (Beale and Reilly, 2017). Conversely, other digital media (including digital photography and digital illustration) were accepted quietly into the discipline with comparatively little theoretical attention within ‘digital archaeology’ despite representing a significant shift in technique, technology and epistemological character (Morgan and Wright 2018).

In this paper we argue (1) that digital media are unique and that, like all technologies, they carry with them a whole range of epistemological assumptions and social-cultural baggage which, if we are inattentive, can find their way, unqueried, into our work (Sterne, 2003). This influence has been so profound that it is no longer possible to think about a truly ‘analogue’ archaeology any more than it is possible to imagine a contemporary archaeological practice which is not dependent upon the digital. In this paper we argue that the state of contemporary archaeological practice resonates with ideas of the ‘postdigital’ (Hall, 2013; Hayes, 2021; Jandrić et al., 2022). We will, through a reflexive analysis of our own work, demonstrate some of the ways in which this interplay between analogue and digital thought and practice has been so dynamic and so profound, that the vast majority of archaeological work, even if it is ostensibly analogue, can now be said to be inflected by the affordances, assumptions and aesthetics of digital practice, technology and culture (Huvila, 2018). Taking this as our starting point, we assert that (2) we must make space for new forms of practice to develop out of this hybridity. In order to meaningfully incorporate emerging forms of digital and postdigital media practice into our discipline we must acknowledge and celebrate these ways of working, re-establishing links to often informative analogue antecedents while also celebrating newness and building long neglected links to related fields of practice outside of archaeology to which many of us, despite being archaeologists, also belong.

The questions which we will try to answer in this paper are related to the realities and practicalities of engaging in the practice of archaeological digital media production within this emerging and unstable technological and cultural ecosystem:

1. What does the new practice of archaeological media look, sound and feel like?
2. How can we re-design our discipline to ensure that we recognise and make space for these emerging forms of practice and re-incorporate these new insights back into the disciplinary mainstream?
3. How do these emerging methods alter the shape of archaeological practice and its relationship to contemporary culture?

To answer these questions, we do not turn our attention directly to media theory or to archaeological theory, but to practice. This paper is grounded in a belief that practice (creative and archaeological) is theoretically generative, in the sense that it can lead to critical engagement with and creation of theoretical positions, but also that practice is intellectual in its own terms and allows access to different questions and other ways of knowing. We also argue that in broadening the scope of our discipline in this way (or rather, recognising that our discipline has broadened while many were not paying attention) we become more diverse, more inclusive and more representative. A great deal of valuable work has been undertaken to apply media theory to archaeological representation and to digital methods (Jorge and Tomas, 2009; Shanks and Svabo, 2013) but that is not the purpose of this paper. Here, we take a different path by attempting to understand the value of contemporary archaeological media work through the process and through the practice of experimental makers.

Paper Structure

Part 2 of our paper provides context and offers a perspective upon contemporary archaeological media-work. We examine some of the key shifts and changes in experimental practice currently taking place within archaeology. Our goal in doing this is not to create a comprehensive or definitive map of the landscape of contemporary media practice within archaeology, nor is it to define too closely the significance or meaning of work which is currently underway and still finding its shape. Rather, what we aim to do here is to identify and explore key themes which have begun to emerge. We do not claim to be universal, for this would not be possible due to our own positionality (geographically, culturally, socially and in terms of our relationship to archaeology – a discipline of which any of us can only ever have a partial view) but we do want to give a sense of an emerging field of thought and practice at a key moment in its development. We seek to describe ways in which archaeology can nurture, respond to and benefit from emerging forms of digital creativity. We take a walk through emerging landscapes of archaeological practice while imagining a future for archaeological work in which representational practice is, arguably for the first time, valued fully as the catalyst and driver for imaginative new forms of archaeological thought and practice that it has the potential to be.

Part 3 is called “Our Practice Journeys” and consists of a series of short films in which each of the authors will give account of our own work and experiences, looking through an auto-ethnographic and auto-biographical lens at how our work in this area over the past decade, particularly those elements of our work which sit at or beyond the limits of conventional archaeological practice, can shine a light on new ways of working and doing archaeology. This self-analysis is not intended to exhaustively describe new ways of doing archaeology with media. Nor is it intended to characterise, demark or limit the range of possible practices which may emerge. Rather, we hope that in offering a deep insight into our work and our thoughts on integrating our work into the epistemological, methodological and political structures of our discipline, we might illustrate the value of experimental practice and the challenges which we face in reconciling and making space for other ways of doing archaeology.

Part 4 of the paper is called “Assemblage” and tells the story of our collaborative creative/archaeological practice as it has developed within the Glencoe Project through a series of ‘media artefacts’ from the project. These include films, hand-built equipment, found objects, animations and an artist’s book. In this section we describe how, through our collaboration, we began to think beyond our own individual practice journeys towards more collaborative and cooperative forms of working. The collaboration allowed us to create multi-authored artefacts which could not have been produced individually. We were able to innovate new ways of working by pooling expertise and experience and by adopting consciously non-proprietorial models of praxis. We argue that this is creatively and methodologically significant and also explore the political implications of these new ways of working.

Finally, in Part 5 we will return to the written word to consider some of the opportunities and challenges in embracing a future for archaeological representation which is increasingly enmeshed with different forms of extra-disciplinary digital practice and creativity. We will consider what it means to be an archaeologist in a postdigital world and will attempt to articulate some guiding principles to inform the emergence of new forms of technologically mediated practice which are inspiring, diverse and ethical.

Part 2 - New Cultures of Archaeological Creativity

Archaeology has been recognised as being a highly visual discipline, often to the detriment of work in other media (Jorge and Tomas, 2009). Critical and theoretical discourse surrounding media and archaeology has been focussed on visual representation which has led to a relative under-theorisation of representational work conducted in non-visual media. It has been focussed on image making as an ancillary practice to other forms of archaeological knowledge work (Smiles and Moser, 2005). While there have been attempts to resist and to challenge this assumption (Bradley, 1997; Gant and Reilly, 2018), there is very little reason to think that it has not remained prevalent within the discipline.

In this section we provide an overview of some of the work that we feel illuminates these changes and effectively conveys a sense of the vibrant reality of contemporary archaeological media work. This should not be read as a systematic review or a comprehensive account. Given the rapid pace of change in this field, we are not persuaded that such an approach would be useful. We are also mindful that even with the best of intentions such an account will always be partial. The work described here encapsulates, and in our view, helps to explain some of the processes of change at work within contemporary archaeological media work as we understand it. We recognise that our work as artists, archaeologists, and designers is rooted in our own experience. It cannot be fully understood in general terms. In order to have meaning and to affect change, it must be understood as emerging from our practice, our interactions (structural and personal) with the world and with archaeology.

Specifically, this overview highlights the ways in which our work in interactive media is linked to diverse cultures of creativity, extending far beyond archaeology, and in so doing will situate archaeological thought and practice within the context of broader creative cultures and cultural identities. We will also tackle issues of inclusivity by exploring the ways in which the affordances of these media, and the diverse creative cultures involved in their production, enable the expression of non-hegemonic perspectives and ways of ‘doing archaeology’.

One of the most striking developments within contemporary archaeological media work has been its expansion beyond ‘image making’. Major innovations in this field emerged from work exploring the use of sound-based approaches. This included purely interpretive work but also creative analytical and modelling based approaches which sought to examine and better understand sound as an integral property of the past (Cooper et al., 2023; Hughes et al., 2020; Murphy et al., 2017). Auditory approaches to the analysis of archaeological subjects and spaces has been enabled by rapid developments in digital acoustic modelling which have led to the simulation of the acoustic properties of virtually reconstructed archaeological environments. This field of archaeological work has gone from being an area of niche concern to being an established area of archaeological practice. This work is notable, not just for its technologically innovative character but also for the fact that (in contrast to many established approaches to making and thinking about images) sound-work has generally been understood to be a knowledge generating process which may have resulted in but was not entirely dependent upon tangible media outputs for its value. The process of sound work was understood to be of use in interpreting, understanding and communicating the past to new audiences. It is worth noting that a great deal of this work has combined technical analyses and a scientific interest in the acoustic behaviour of built space with a deep investment in the cultural and artistic activities which often characterised these acoustic landscapes, and here we see a lively and dynamic interdisciplinarity, the entanglement of the arts, humanities and digital sciences tackled in different ways, by different researchers (López et al., 2022; Murphy et al., 2017). As such, archaeological approaches to the study of acoustics can be said to have played a pivotal role in shifting assumptions around representational practice towards an understanding of practice as research and towards an acknowledgement of the importance of interdisciplinarity and of working across creative and technical cultures extending beyond the limits of the academy.

The more-than-visual nature of contemporary media work in archaeology extends beyond the purely auditory and also includes a range of mixed and multi-media approaches. Landscape archaeologist Rose Ferraby and sound artist Rob St. John have adopted a hybrid approach to landscape interpretation and media production by combining digital approaches to environmental sound work with digital and analogue image making to interpret and augment audiences experience of archaeological landscapes (Ferraby and St. John, 2020). Their work consciously draws upon developments in fine arts practice to enrich audiences’ experiences of landscape without necessarily providing the kinds of didactic interpretations which have tended to characterise archaeological interpretation. They have used a range of approaches to mediation, including landscape scale media installations, gallery installations and film to communicate with audiences but it is clear from their own discussion of their work that the process of making is as, if not more, important than the output. Media production within their work is a process of interpreting, absorbing and building understandings of place through extended contact and attentiveness. Ideas of media-hybridity and of presence within the landscape also run through Mona Bozdog’s research into the use of game-like experiences as a means of interpreting and encouraging responses to archaeological landscapes. In the Inchcolm Project, Bozdog restaged (and re-imagined) the computer game Dear Esther (Bozdog and Galloway, 2020, 2017) on the island of Inchcolm as a piece of analogue/digital immersive theatre. This installation encouraged the exploration of the natural and historic environment and drew upon themes present within the original game to highlight the archaeological, historical and political complexities of the landscape within which the experience took place. Significantly, Bozdog’s subversion of conventional approaches to genre continued work already undertaken by the original game developers to overcome perceived genre restrictions within the games industry (Pinchbeck, 2015). Bozdog’s work highlighted themes of migration and social justice as part of the interpretive process and in so doing presented a challenge to established limits of archaeological and historical interpretation.

Neither Ferraby nor Bozdog’s work fit comfortably within the established parameters of archaeological representation. They push at the conventional limits of disciplinary traditions of representation, incorporating themes and ideas from outside of the discipline as well as engaging audiences as active participants in the creation of the media. As well as this expansion of scope they also demonstrate a fluidity and multi-modality in their approach, moving between genres, media and technologies as needed. This stands in contrast to the established ways of writing and thinking about archaeological representation which are most often grouped according to the technology in use. For example, we have distinct traditions on literature on archaeological photography, archaeological film making, archaeological computer graphics and archaeological illustration (Smiles and Moser, 2005). Bozdog and Ferraby’s work crosses these frontiers and in so doing, creates new visions of what it is possible to achieve by deploying media practice in an exploratory way within an archaeological setting. In order to appreciate these aspects of their work it is necessary to acknowledge the value of practice-based research and to accept that innovations achieved in this way (i.e. the creation of new ways of ‘doing archaeology’ realised through exploratory practice) are just as valuable as those achieved through more conventional or formalised methodological approaches.

The development of new approaches to media work which cross boundaries between analogue and digital practice is not confined to sound work. Notable in this area has been Paul Reilly’s work with Stefan Gant on the interplay between archaeological practice and drawing (Gant and Reilly, 2018) and with Ian Dawson (Dawson et al., 2021). Gant and Reilly’s work, carried our on the excavation of the Iron Age hillfort at Bodfari in Wales, actively explores the similarities between practices of archaeological excavation, including processes of digital documentation and recording as well as traditional archaeological practices, and experimental practices of drawing as used by Gant in his work as a fine artist. This work echoes many previous attempts to engage fine artists in the archaeological process but, by conducting their work as a shared experiment in practice, by pursuing a two way exchange of knowledge and ways of knowing, Reilly and Gant provide a model of an archaeological practice in which non-archaeologists can contribute to the creation of new forms of archaeological work whilst simultaneously contributing to, and affecting, practice in a different discipline. Similarly, Reilly’s work with sculptor Ian Dawson (Reilly and Dawson, 2021) has focussed on the experimental use and subversion of digital imaging techniques such as Reflectance Transformation Imaging as a means of commenting upon and re-shaping practice around the hybridised world of blended physical-digital representations and ideas of mixed-reality. In this work, strategies born out of fine art, of enquiry through making, the playful exploration of ideas through play and experiment, are deployed within archaeology and used to critically engage with archaeological practice. This is more than interdisciplinarity in the sense that through operating at the level of practice, it has become possible for their work to transcend the kinds of epistemological, conceptual and cultural misalignments which often present challenges to this kind of collaborative arts-archaeology work.

We also want to acknowledge the work of Alice Watterson, an archaeologist and image maker with a very strong sense of the power of representation and of the philosophical and epistemological character of her own work. Watterson’s seminal papers on ideas of ‘Digital Dwelling’ (Watterson, 2015; Watterson et al., 2014) outlined, perhaps for the first time, the value and importance of ‘living with’ digital practice as a means of creating new forms of archaeological knowledge and of the value of combining analogue and digital practice in order to generate new forms of understanding. Watterson has gone onto produce archaeological representations across a wide range of media and has continued to query, test and challenge the epistemological status of archaeological representation within the discipline, often innovating through the adoption of cross-cultural and indigenous perspectives (Hillerdal et al., 2022; Watterson and Hillerdal, 2020). What is particularly powerful about Watterson’s work (and what is particularly important about it to us) is the way in which she has constantly combined innovative forms of creative practice with a deeply perceptive analysis of the status and position of her work within the discipline. This instance on the value of ‘other ways of knowing’ which sit outside of empirical norms and, in some cases, directly challenge the subject-object dichotomy which is so endemic within mainstream archaeological practice has provided great inspiration to the work presented here.

In recent years we have begun to see an expansion in the scope and ambition of archaeological digital media work. Creative approaches to archaeological media production have begun to challenge the implicit limitations within established and formalised approaches to media work and the epistemological and aesthetic assumptions which underpin them (Moser, 2012; Moser and Gamble, 1997; Shanks and Svabo, 2013). Emerging forms of archaeological representation have started to trouble conventional assumptions relating to the character and function of representation and media making. They have begun to erode disciplinary and genre boundaries, often drawing upon influences from beyond the traditional confines of archaeological thought and practice (Beale, 2024; Beale and Reilly, 2017; Dawson et al., 2021; Smith, 2024). We have also seen a more widespread embrace of media-making as a form of knowledge creation and mediation, ideas which have long been present within archaeology, but which have recently become more prevalent, more fully articulated and more firmly established (Earl, 2013; Shanks and Svabo, 2013).

All of the work described here is unique, distinct, and in the opinion of the authors very significant. We hope that in drawing this work together into a single account we have been able to reveal themes and trends which tie a lot of this work together and which give a flavour of the community of practice within which the authors are operating. The work presented here is all deeply archaeological but only about half of it has been undertaken by self-described archaeologists. It is this inter-disciplinary character which enables all of the work presented here to test the limits of conventional archaeological epistemologies - requiring a new ways of thinking about the material past and the ways in which we engage with it, understand it, and respond to it. Furthermore, the work presented here asks important questions about why we do archaeology: it is rich with questions of identity, emotion and of what material culture says about our shared experience of humanity, questions which creative practice is ideally placed to answer but which have remained in the shadows of much recent archaeological discourse.

It is not our desire to artificially band this work together as though it belonged to a defined movement or turn within archaeological or artistic work, but rather to demonstrate that in its sheer diversity, complexity and importance, this body of work constitutes a powerful argument that archaeology’s understanding of itself and the role of media work within the discipline needs to change. This provides the case for change but what does the change look like? This is not a question which can be answered simply, or in a single way. In the rest of the paper, we describe our way, before returning in our conclusions to present more wide-ranging suggestions for a future archaeology which meaningfully incorporates and benefits from digital creative practice.

Part 3 - Our Practice Journeys

Having presented our community of ideas and practice we will now turn our attention inwards and, through reflecting upon and sharing our own practice, we will provide an account of what it means to be an archaeologist, artist and maker working with interactive digital media at the moment. Where the previous section was intended to contextualise, this section is intended to provide depth. Where in the previous section we outlined the ideas of others and their interconnectivities, this section is a personal account. Here we share the ‘Practice Journeys’ of the three authors and reflect upon the process of experimenting with and incorporating analogue and digital media into our own work as archaeologists. We reflect upon our own biographies and recognise the diverse influences on our work, including family and personal lives, recognising that these relationships and inheritances influence our practice as archaeologists and give value and meaning to our work.

With this section we do not intend to provide a benchmark for good practice or to show, in any complete sense, what experimental media practice looks like. Rather, we hope to outline the strategies, connections and passions which have motivated our own work. We explain how we have operationalised our often unconventional approaches within an archaeological research framework and we explain how, as our practice journeys have converged, we have found new ways of working though collaboration. At the heart of each of these stories is an account of how the often almost invisible methodologies and epistemologies which govern contemporary archaeological practice have had to be re-cast, re-wired and sometimes actively subverted in order to make space for new ways of working and other ways of knowing.

These films were made over the Autumn and Early Winter of 2024. Each film was a collaboration between each of the three authors, with the focus shifting to each of us in turn. They can be watched in any order and do not form a linear narrative. Although each film focusses on one person’s practice, they can also be understood and watched as a whole, providing an insight into a close-knit community of practice as they continue to collaborate.

Part 4 – Assemblage

In Part 3 of this research paper, we introduced our Practice Journeys as archaeologists undertaking to use creative practice as our main research method. In this section we will talk about the convergence of these journeys and the ways in which our practice developed individually and in collaboration through our work on the Glencoe project. In the spirit of this paper, and of practice-based research more broadly, this examination will take place through the close study of a series of artefacts. This assemblage contains films, sound art, animations, hand-built equipment, and poetry, and it tells the story of our emerging collaborative practice. These artefacts represent moments of convergence, collaboration or inspiration shared, they embody the excitement of co-creating innovative things and they also stand as a testament to the value of genuine collaboration and community building. They are crystallisations of the relationships which emerged within our community of practice, and they offer, as we shall explore below, an insight into one vision of the future for truly creative digital practice of archaeological representation.

The Glencoe Project

All of these artefacts emerged out of the Glencoe Project, an archaeological research project and field school based at the University of Glasgow and National Trust for Scotland. The project began five years ago but draws upon and represents the continuation of a much longer history of research in Glencoe by the authors and the other project co-directors. The work presented here is the culmination of our shared research journey to this point. The project was inspired by Derek Alexander, Head of Archaeological Services at National Trust for Scotland with whom Gareth and Lizzie planned a potential PhD project investigating sound as a means of exploring and understanding archaeology within the contemporary landscape of Glencoe. Lizzie was successful in getting AHRC funding and began her PhD shortly afterwards on this topic. Consequently, Lizzie and Gareth spent a lot of time within this landscape developing new approaches to creative work. At the same time Eddie Stewart, a Co-director on the Glencoe project, was also beginning his PhD work, supervised by Michael Given, in Glencoe using excavation on survey to understand patterns of upland grazing during the Early Modern period. As these projects continued the potential for further research became evident and the Glencoe field school was established as a research and training excavation conducted with students from the University of Glasgow. Nicole became involved in the first season of the field school, bringing her interest in outdoor education and community working practices to the project. At the time of publication, the field school has been running for two years and is co-directed by Lizzie, Eddie, Derek, Nicole, Michael, and Gareth. More information about the Glencoe Project can be found at our project website: The Glencoe Project Website and in the first preliminary reports of the excavation and survey (Stewart, 2023). Lizzie, Nicole, and Gareth collaborate in other spaces, but we focus here on our Glencoe practice specifically.

Archaeology in the Cracks

The Glencoe project provided an opportunity, unique in the careers of all of the authors, to imagine and actualise a research project built around the methodological and organisational ideals which have informed our work within more conventional archaeological frameworks but which have been constrained by conventions of archaeological practice. Methodologically speaking, this entailed a commitment to practice-based research and creative practice as a means of creating archaeological knowledge and understandings. It also meant an acknowledgement that, in order to reach this point, a considerable investment amount of time and energy would need to be invested in the development of new forms of practice and that this work was a worthwhile and important part of our archaeological fieldwork. Multimedia creative practice has very rarely performed such a central role within archaeological work and this project gave us the opportunity not just to foreground these techniques and technologies but also to design them anew, to figure out what this kind of archaeology looks like.

In this paper, we ask both what constitutes creative practice in this situated and specific context, and how our definition fits with current ideas about creativity as it manifests within practice-based and practice-led research. Firstly, our own personal experiences with creative digital practice are aligned with assumptions that practice is theoretically generative (Gergen, 1994; Carter, 2004; Haseman, 2006; Sullivan, 2009; Candy et al., 2021; Sade, 2021). In this way, practice helps us to answer already chosen questions as well as being an essential tool within our research process for the identification and creation of new directions for research. Secondly, practice is exploratory and does not fit comfortably into standard research practice. We embrace this discomfort through creating points of contact with one another as waypoints to embolden practice. Because practice is intellectual in its own terms, it provides us with access to new questions and ways of knowing that are outwith the existing scaffolding of archaeological theory. Thirdly, key to undertaking creative practice that overcomes the narrow confines of existing theory, we must embrace experimental making and undertake media work as a form of craft rather than as a tool to achieve outcomes. This is in line with the need to acknowledge the ‘interaction’ of matter as defined by Barad (2007), where we cannot achieve, and nor should we strive to arrive at, an objective end when using technologies. For a more in-depth analysis of the loss of subjectivity and subject for digital art, see Hahn (2021). Within this form of digital creative practice, that is theoretically generative and exploratory, we must explore the value of image-making practice for archaeology and create meaningful ways to build in recognition of value for this work.

Creative practice has occupied an auxiliary position within archaeology. It has always been present within archaeological practice (in, for example, the form of painting, sketching and experimental photography) but has often been marginalised and excluded from the formal archaeological record (Smiles and Moser, 2008). Furthermore, creativity has often been outsourced to non-archaeologists through informal or formal collaboration which, rather than closing the gap between creativity and archaeology, has often served to highlight differences of perception, procedure and practice between two quite different disciplines and to posit these fields of work as irreconcilably distinct. Our practice journeys and our wider community of practice as described in Part 2 of this paper gave us the experience and confidence to believe that this distinction can be challenged, and that creative practice can form a central part of archaeological practice. Furthermore, we believed that this need not just be in communicating knowledge developed using conventional techniques, but at every stage of the archaeological process, including the generation and interpretation of new understandings of the past.

In addition to the challenges of embedding creativity within archaeological traditions of practice, we are operating as researcher archaeologists, within a Higher Education context. Our research activities are therefore impacted by the sector’s current accountability preoccupation and the need to demonstrate this through any research activity that claims to align with the production of knowledge (Strathern, 2000; Cate, 2011). This need to audit knowledge within our outputs and to evidence conclusions from this (Bell, 2009) is in opposition to the self-reflexive embeddedness of creative practice (Watson, 2011). Our own collaborative practice, outlined in the following passages, chimes with Parikka’s call for a speculative lab inspired by speculative design, that moves away from a preoccupation with art futures and instead pursues the “speculative past” (2017: 78). We see our enmeshed practice as a collective through which we can imagine alternative pasts via a practice of experimentation. In this, we acknowledge our relationship with institutions (such as the University and the discipline of Archaeology) whilst simultaneously remaining situated within the physical and emotional specifics of place, in this instance, the Highlands of Scotland.

There are challenges here certainly, but also opportunities, as the works in this paper respond to the need for demonstration of knowledge production. We found that the artworks we were producing together and individually formed not only part of the outputs of the research being carried out at Glencoe but also were a key part of the process of knowing. As making occurred throughout the field seasons and in the gaps between. At all points in the research process, creative practice has played a key role in decision making and idea generation. By making creative responses to things and moments at Glencoe, we were activating the stories that were collectively being constructed from the data collected.

Within the Glencoe project creative practice was to contribute towards the development of research aims, the development of the shape and structure of the project, the manner by which other forms of practice were undertaken and, crucially, in the development of new knowledge. The issue with designing a project in this way is that relatively few precedents exist for reconciling creative practice and ways of knowing with archaeological methodologies and epistemologies. Because of this, the Glencoe project was a simultaneous experiment in the development of new forms of hybrid practice in which all parts of the project informed each other and operated in a constant reflexive discussion. Not only did we develop new forms of creative practice tailored specifically to generating new understandings of archaeological landscapes (we discuss this at greater length below below) we also developed hybridised forms of excavation and survey practice which incorporated elements of creative practice and made use of new forms of archaeological data generated through our creative work. If this all sounds very harmonious and easy, it was not.

The co-presence of different research paradigms within one project enabled the development of a self-critical and deeply reflexive form of archaeological practice in which many of the conventions and assumptions of archaeological work, including methods and epistemologies which are often taken for granted, were called into question. Different ways of knowing were able to exist side by side with each other, sometimes in tension and sometimes in apparently contradictory ways. This was a by-product of combining and co-situating different ways of doing and thinking about archaeology, but there were deeper forces at work. All of the authors found creative archaeological practice to be emancipatory for it has provided the freedom to develop forms of neurodiversity-friendly and non-disabling forms of archaeological research which exist outside of formalised and text-centric practice and use different ways of working, different ways of knowing, and different ways of being within an archaeological context. These feelings resonate with work undertaken by authors working across the Humanities (Bertilsdottir, et al. 2023 [1], Bertilsdottir, et al. 2023[2]) and are discussed by Gareth in his practice journey in Part 2 and is discussed at greater length below as we examine some of the collaborative work which we have undertaken.

The practice journeys in Part 3 of this paper, and the artists’ statements that follow here, respond to the recognised close relationship between practice-led and practice-based research, where firstly creative practice is the research itself, and latterly, the act of creative making leads to findings that constitute research (Smith & Dean, 2009: 5). The artists’ statements are our response to the need to document all aspects of practice: the outputs created from practice, the theory generated from those outputs, and the doing itself. The practice of the creation of these statements themselves aligns with Marcus’ categorisation of the artist’s statement as an actively produced performance (Marcus, 1994; Belshaw, 2011). In this enactment, the self-generated explanation is essential (Haseman, 2006), and we embrace these reflections as what Cosslett et al. refer to as a “vital resource” in the creation of knowledge (Cosslett et al., 2000: 2). At Glencoe, gradually, a new archaeology began to emerge. Excavation, survey and creative work, all archaeological but each also different and a little bit weird. Deeply embedded in the temporally deep materiality of lives lived within a landscape, but bleeding out into broader themes of identity, community, personhood and spirituality pursued just as rigorously and with the same urgency as other archaeological questions.

Assemblage

When discussing our practice journeys we hoped that by addressing the deep specificities of our own practice, we would also reveal truths about archaeology and being which might be useful to others. Similarly, in this section we seek to address the universal through a deep exploration of the specific. Here we draw focus onto an assemblage of archaeological media-artefacts. Through these artefacts we tell a story which will, we hope, be recognisable and meaningful to the reader. This is the story of an emergent creative collaboration, it is a story about the role of creative practice within what is conventionally described as archaeological research, and this is a story about the formation of relationships which enabled our community to have the confidence, support and inspiration to do archaeological representation in new ways. In engaging with this story and engaging with the artefacts which we present here, we hope that the reader will be inspired to begin or to continue their own creative journey through archaeological practice, and we hope that some of our hard-won insights might ease this journey and help you on your way.

Artefact 1: Achtriochtan (2022) (Gareth and Lizzie)

Achtriochtan is a short film produced by Gareth and Lizzie in 2022. It was produced to be shown in the turf house at the National Trust for Scotland Glencoe Visitor Centre. The construction of the turf house was based upon and inspired by Derek’s excavations at a house in Achtriochtan and it was from the site of these excavations that the film footage was shot. It was created with the camera obscura (Artefact 4 – discussed below) which Gareth made while working on the Glencoe project. The film footage was edited over an audio track that Lizzie had already produced using a ‘composed film’ approach to film making in which the audio track provides the underpinning structure, feel and pace for the film, with the film footage edited over the top (Street, 2009). Projected inside the reconstructed turf house the film was intended to create echoes of the landscape of the original house and to re-connect the new turf house to its long-fallen antecedent. The audio track was an extract from a longer piece called River Coe Storywalk which Lizzie had composed as part of her PhD work. In this piece, Lizzie explored some of the storytelling that blends memory of the Glencoe Massacre with landscape, and in this excerpt, we hear the Gaelic song Mhnathan a’ ghlinne seo plucked on an echoey violin. Layered over the top of this are harmonising scrapes across strings, as well as sounds from field recordings taken from Glencoe. The film footage was an experiment in creating less representational visual material from archaeological sites and was part of a project to capture the feeling of the potential of archaeological film as a non-narrative and non-naturalistic medium.

Gareth: Lines converge in this film. I had just brought the Camera Obscura up from my workshop in Helensburgh for the first time and to bring it into the light at Glencoe felt like it came to life. Over several weeks, the camera had been a focal point for my thinking, drawing together and embodying my thoughts on my emerging creative practice, its relationship to the archaeological work which we were undertaking in Glencoe, and manifesting this through the creation of something tangible, in glass, wood and metal. It was in these moments that the idea of the syncretic object crystalised in my mind (Beale 2024), as the making of the camera drew together my personal sense of self, finding meaning in ways of knowing, making and being which were derived from my place within my family, and my professional work for the first time, archaeology felt spiritually alive.

One inspiration on the representational style in this film, particularly the move towards abstraction was the work on Peatlands which I had been undertaking with Nicole, Nicki Whitehouse, Clare Willsden and Mel Giles on the convergence of scientific and artistic practices within the archaeology of peat (Bright Edge Deep 2021). As I looked into the camera at Achtriochtan, the Three Sisters looked back through the ground glass screen. Uncanny, blurred and inverted, it was possible to see differently, to see the heavy white clouds moving across the dark hillsides, the silver streams and green trees blocking and bisecting the image. Those ever changing images, composition shifting and morphing, were a very long way from the formal descriptive symbolism of conventional archaeological image making. The impetus to move away from naturalistic photography and towards non-representational image making came, in part from working with Lizzie on her landscape compositions. I was struck by the fact that even the most crystal clear sound recordings can, out of context, feel unrecognisable and abstract; they are direct and immediate but they also require the listener to interpret, to invent, to imagine. As I began to edit the footage over Lizzie’s soundscape the images began to change, their meaning shifted, they began to work in dialogue with the sound and they were, to my mind at least, drawn even further into the dream world, part of an imagined glen.

Lizzie: The audio for this piece represents one of my first compositions about Glencoe and recalls for me memories of my first significant fieldwork in Glencoe during the PhD. I had spent a couple of showery April days in Gleann Leac na Muidhe, recording 17th century sheilings and charcoal-burning platforms as part of my colleague Eddie’s research (Stewart, 2023). I then took a full day to myself to think and work through some of my own research questions in the field. Head full of survey forms and archaeological surveyor’s techniques, I remember wandering around Glencoe that day with my microphone, wanting to cling to the familiarity of these conventions, but also wanting to allow some room for creative response. These formats also represented a largely visual response to the archaeological landscape, and I was struggling to get to grips with how my listening and recording practices might represent an archaeological enquiry into this landscape.

Practice in this context offered a means of thinking through these struggles through the act of creating and doing. Away from Glencoe, I had been researching the archaeological record, listening to the oral histories and stories associated with this landscape. What I discovered was that field recording and listening revealed new narratives that I hadn’t previously considered. Whilst picking a muddy path along the banks of river Coe, I recorded my rambling memories of a story I had heard from storyteller Ceit Langhorne, about a boy who was spared by a government soldier in the Glencoe massacre (Given et al., 2021; Langhorne, 2025). Meanwhile, other voices were at play: to my right, there were the intermittent roars of cars, lorries and motorbikes from the A82, amplified tenfold by the surrounding mountains; to my left, the gurling, sucking noises of the river Coe. In the branches of hazel, birch, and alder, chaffinches chirped a cricket-like warning call, which apparently, they do if rain is on the way. A fusion of practice was emerging, informed by years of studying archaeology, and also of an interest in the work of sound artists such as Janet Cardiff and Hildegard Westerkamp.

In post-production from my Glasgow flat and the PhD office, I reconnected these strands together. There were snippets of tape recordings from 1959 of Ginger Wilson of Glencoe, recalling the story about the soldier and the boy in Gaelic (Wilson, 1959), plucked melodies on my violin, and my own memories of that day in Glencoe along the river. The section included in this film has a bit of a shimmering, sunny feel to it. The day I recorded along the river Coe on that afternoon in April 2021 was actually sunny, the first of the whole trip, and the last. It poured thereafter.

Achnacon, the river Coe, my Glasgow flat, Achtriachtan. Whilst Gareth filmed the footage for this film at Achtriachtan, an audience of PGR researchers from Glasgow wandered around the township, just out of frame, listening to this composition I had created via a radio, and embedding this story into this different part of the landscape with their feet. Creating new emotional geographies of place.

Artefact 2: Barbara Fairweather Collects (2024) (Nicole and Lizzie)

This film came out of Lizzie and Nicole’s conversations about the Glencoe Folk Museum’s founder, Barbara Fairweather.

Nicole: Lizzie and I had talked in the past about some of the challenges to making creative responses to archaeology that were not intended to be a shared work, but instead were a throwaway output, part of the process of thinking. This animation is an example of this kind of object. The thing itself that we made, a short 30 second film, was not significant. Instead, this was about our personal responses to the museum in Glencoe Village, the women involved in beginning the collection, our own experiences as women working in the heritage sector, and the moment in which the creation of the animation itself took place.

On a drizzly but sun-filled July morning, the two of us visited the Glencoe Folk Museum to run a day on collections and digital making with our Archaeology students. After an initial introductory tour with the Curator and the Education Officer, we took an impromptu walk through the village of Glencoe and along the banks of Loch Leven to see if we could locate the house in which Fairweather had lived. On the walk from the campsite earlier that morning where we were staying, we had spotted a huge red stag, enjoying the flowers in someone’s back garden, and lazily looking around at the gawping hikers. The scene was surrounded by the throaty sound of motorbikes roaring far too fast along the A82 and I was preoccupied with news of another crash recently along the over-used road. I had brought my 4-year-old son with me, and he was chattering away to the students about the museum that we had visited in the morning. After achieving our goal of locating the house, we took a leisurely stroll all together back to the museum, where we enjoyed a cup of tea. Lizzie and I joked about the mini adventure we’d undertaken and the image of the stag (as a symbol of the Highlands), munching on someone’s hard won azaleas. This sharing of our joyful walk fed into our plans to make a stop motion paper-based animation of a story told to us by the Curator of Glencoe Folk Museum of how the collection came into being, with unexpected donations arriving via the local postman. This was a familiar experience from my own time as a curator and I wanted to create something that reflected the serendipity of local museum collection growth. There is a rich tradition of women establishing museums in the Highlands, such as Isabel Grant’s Am Fasgadh at Iona and now Kingussie (Grant, 1961) and Hope MacDougall’s collection at Ganavan House (1996-1998), now at Dunollie Museum, Oban. Fairweather’s work with Rae Grant to create a collection for Glencoe and its environs in the 1960s shares in this heritage, as they campaigned for, and then established, a local collection. We were very interested in how the women’s work of bake sales and ceilidhs (Davidson, 2024) had been instrumental in the establishing of the collection and that this quiet campaigning is rarely recognised in origin stories for organisations.

Lizzie and I wanted to create something that spoke to the DIY aspects of archaeological and museums work, and so the story told in this animation as well as the medium used, reflects this. We worked together over the course of an afternoon, whilst also working with our students who were designing interpretation for the museum. We chatted about our own experiences with museum collections and experiences of making and hacking as problem solving and fun while we sketched out ideas and used one of our site-cameras that had been recording artefacts, cuts, and contexts on the hillside, to create a lighthearted silent tale of Barbara receiving a gift of a statue from the local postman. I remember thinking while we were doing it about the juxtaposition on the memory card in the camera of our images with those that we had been capturing on the hillside to record the excavations and how the fun of the making did not detract from our motivations for creating it. This chimed with experiences we had both had with zine making (Piepmeier, 2012), museum hackathons (Turner et al., 2021), and, for me personally, maternal journalling (Godfrey-Isaacs, 2021). We were interested in the idea that the way in which the collection came to be is as significant to the story of Glencoe and Ballahulish as the collection itself, and this animation aimed to focus on the creators of the museum and the community that donated items, rather than the objects that make up the collection. It is this focus on people that motivated us to make this film as a representation of the network of things at Glencoe, as domestic objects became artefacts and women became curators and archivists. The video is online, published on YouTube.

Artefact 3: Artists Book – Drawing through archaeology (Nicole)

Nicole: This folded, threaded paper book is an artefact from a summer season at Glencoe. I wanted to engage with the idea of scale and challenge myself to acknowledge the different scales with which we experience landscape. Specifically, this work focuses on the ways in which we separate the things surrounding us into near and far, here and there, as we move through space. As part of this, there is also an implicit interrogation of how we relate these things to ourselves. The place of our own body within the landscape. This piece speaks to how our actions on site, as part of the enactment of excavating and surveying, are an intentional drawing of lines between related things: sighting from one thing to another with surveying equipment or making connections between one thing and another across contexts or cuts. I wanted to experiment with ways to translate this linking of things onto paper. The folded artefact that I made, is a meandering book, and has interconnections sewn into it to trace movement around the archaeology as it was uncovered.

The work is also informed by my own journey through archaeology. My first experience of archaeology was as a volunteer at an excavation in Dorset at the age of fourteen and my first introduction to the work of archaeology was using a dip pen to painstakingly add numbers to Mesolithic snail shells. I was instantly enamoured with the ‘doing’ of archaeology. I remember feeling sitting in a warm steamy kitchen drinking tea, which felt very grown up indeed, and listening to the conversations carrying on around me as archaeologists discussed the day’s work and made connections between things observed and felt. Deciding a few years later in the mid-nineties to undertake an AS Level in Archaeology at a Further Education College, my experience of the thinking of archaeology moved me farther and farther from my original physical interaction with the past and the doing of archaeology. This was frustrating and left me feeling for several years that there was a disconnect between my experiences as a field archaeologist, something that I continued to do, and my experiences in the classroom, where the formalising of approaches to knowledge and archaeological theory seemed to be creating a chasm between the archaeology and myself. I have often reflected on the gap between these educational and professional experiences and my embodied relationship with the actual archaeology that I have excavated, cleaned, drawn, and digitally recorded.

This artist’s book is an exploration of what constitutes the ‘work’ of archaeology and is comprised of moments that reference the unseen work carried out by archaeologists when we are on site. I wanted to capture in particular the in-betweenness of decision-making. These unnoticed, highly personal points of contact, such as the of rolling soil between the thumb and index finger to establish consistency, or noticing the sunlight creating shadows on a cut, represent for me a moment of communing with the archaeology.

The interplay between the theoretical frameworks through which we weave our patchworks of understanding have always felt too myopic in my own practice of digital recording of archaeology. In this piece, I explore ways to interweave the personal response to archaeology with the narratives being constructed, so that what is instead created is an interconnected patchwork of individual resonances archaeology. My drawing practice is a recovery of this personal connection, as it acts as a form of communication between the archaeology and me. As a mother, drawing became a necessity as a form of self-reflection and recording as I undertook the journey of motherhood; in my work, there is a need to include a record of myself. My drawings at Glencoe are imbued with my own biography. The piece also records my observations of others around me, including traces of people as they moved around the site. In these threads, the movements of experienced archaeologists merge with those external to the action of archaeology as people visited the site. The lines that are woven through the pages of the book are paths trodden and decisions made.

This layering of paths is inspired by Lizzie’s sound work as she layers different responses to the archaeology, and this is an overlap between our approaches to the record of the Glencoe. I used found sheep’s wool to trace footsteps. I drew with an ink made one evening by grinding peat with a stone that I had picked up from the soil heap. This translation of the colour of the land as it permeated the different mediums, transforming from soil to liquid to textile, was a way for me to create a representation of the interconnections between person and place. Weaving the wool into the paper, passing it through the images and textures that I had layered onto the paper, creates a trace of my physical interaction with the land and how to record the presence of myself in the work (Seger, 2021). The paths that I traced were observed over several days but overlap and twist together in the final piece. In this way, the work transverses time. This is a nod to Gareth’s filmmaking where time is compressed or stretched out and loses its materiality in the cutting and pasting of moving images. The paths are all of equal significance, obscuring the existing knowledge hierarchies on site. Each person’s individual movements are of equal value in creating the web of threads. The dip pen and ink used to scratch shapes into the paper are in homage to the Mesolithic shells that formed my first relationship with archaeology 30 years ago.

Artefact 4: Camera Obscura (Gareth)

Gareth: I have discussed the Camera Obscura several times in this paper but, as an artefact of our collaborative practice and of a personal move towards new ways of doing archaeology, it deserves some attention to be focussed upon it. The camera represents the crystallisation or embodiment of a number of themes in my life and work and it is a significant artefact not only of my own practice journey but also of a collaborative practice which has enabled the development of work which would never have occurred had I been working alone. Footage from the camera can be seen above in Rannoch and in Achtriochtan. Methodologically and in terms of my practice, the camera represents a move away from the kinds of naturalistic photography which are enmeshed with archaeological practice and which, in other ways, dominate contemporary photography and film making, particularly that undertaken with smart phones and modern digital cameras. The camera was intended to wilfully interrupt the ‘self-evident’ functions (technical, social, creative) of the modern digital camera and to replace them with something highly visible and quite unpredictable. This is not a question of authenticity vs inauthenticity (there is to my mind, nothing inherently more authentic about the analogue, the wooden, the handmade than the digital, metal and machine made – they are just different) but it is question of control, or of the desire to create the conditions for loss of control, for chaos, for serendipity, as well as a desire to create this state of unpredictability. I was also motivated by my work with Lizzie and her use of sound. I became very aware of the power of ambiguity and abstraction within representational practice to create room for interpretation, for response, for meaning making, a physical breaking of deeply engrained methodological and epistemological norms. The images produced with this camera are not really pictures of anything, they are documents of a physical moment, the interplay of landscape and light mediated by this imperfect machine, itself the crystallisation of a complex multi-generational web of intentionality, learning and love. The camera is a living thing at the centre of all of this, syncretic and animated by light.

In the spirit of this section, I should also talk about the making of the camera as a thing of value in its own right. The process of making was meditative, taking place alongside a lot of thinking about the future of my practice and the ways in which my practice as an archaeologist was entangled with my broader experience of being. The process of making enabled me to deepen my understanding of these connections. I talked a lot to my family about how it would work, solving practical problems and also reflecting upon how much my grandfather, the film maker, would have loved this project. It also provided space within which to think about different forms of expertise and different ways of constructing knowledge. The acquisition of skill which was central to the making of the camera was an important part of this research. It was a critical and creative process which allowed me to re-formulate ideas of the photographic image from the bottom up and to meditate on its role within archaeological work. This was archaeological theory building conducted not via semiotics but conducted through embodied and sensory means. The camera is an artefact of an inclusive archaeological practice in which the formal epistemologies of archaeology, be they scientific or philosophical, have been augmented with something more physical, more exploratory and more meaningful to me, as a dyslexic thinker.

Artefact 5: Microphone (Lizzie)

Lizzie: The act of recording, whether that’s in the field, or at home in Glasgow, whether its subject is conversation between friends and colleagues, playing my violin and singing, or plunged into the depths of a bog, has been about collaborating. A collaboration of friends and colleagues, my instruments and improvised sound-makers, technology, and the landscapes and ecologies of Glencoe and Rannoch Moor.

The microphones were an opportunity to embrace being interdisciplinary as an Archaeologist. I would say that I was very lucky during my undergrad in that by the time I was studying (mid 2010s), I felt like I was surrounded by a culture of Archaeologists that were working in experimental and creative ways. Visual work by Alice Watterson, a previous graduate of the course I was on, really opened my eyes to what doing Archaeology could be, and the department did various projects with Northlight Heritage, which had a lot of cool community/arts/archaeology stuff going on.

This was refreshing and inspiring, because throughout high school, I had always been interested in the creative and performing arts. I enjoyed the practice of making and creating but felt discouraged by my high school teachers to pursue these in higher education. My mum is a primary teacher with a music specialism, and when she was training, she said there was always an emphasis on cross-curricular teaching. Music, sound, and creative ways of thinking and doing flowed through all her lessons, and so returning to this as a way of thinking and doing archaeology made sense! In a climate where funding to the arts sector continues to be chipped away, celebrating the importance of practice and creativity through archaeology is a way of remembering how important it is for us to explore other ways of knowing and expressing ourselves.

Both the contact microphones and the hydrophone helped me explore the more experimental and DIY approaches to sound recording. With the zoom recorder’s X/Y microphones, my recordings were mostly environmental and documentary. With the contact mic and hydrophone, however, I started actively engaging with my environment in order to make noises, to turn the everyday into potential musical instruments (Eck, 2017, p. 108). This exploration led to a transformative approach to my fieldwork and compositional practice, with a focus on being an active participant in this landscape, and interacting with the materiality of things and their sonic qualities.

Recording has also been about extending my senses – using different kinds of microphones, I’ve been able to heighten my sense of awareness of certain sonic experiences (Westerkamp, 2002, p. 53; Krause, 2012, p. 15). Whether it was the squeaking snap of frost under our boots in Gleann Leac na muidhe in November, the trickling of oxygen from moss up the side of my hydrophone in the pools of Rannoch Moor, or the vibrations travelling through barbed wire as it is plucked. It has let me imagine experiences of the landscape on different levels and scales, as well as the opening up of different spaces of listening.

For me, archaeology has been about storytelling, using ways of expressing myself that have always made sense to me. It’s DIY. It’s, “well, maybe I’m not a trained artist, maybe I’m too undisciplined to churn out high-ranking research papers, maybe I get too much stage-fright to be a musician… but maybe I can express my multiplicities through something I make”. The format of putting things down on paper sometimes leaves out the incidental, the digression, the collaboration from family, friends and colleagues that helped us along the way.

Artefact 6: Rannoch (2025) (Gareth, Lizzie, and Nicole)

Rannoch is a short film with sound by Lizzie, animation and illustration by Nicole and film footage by Gareth. This film was produced in 2025, three years after Achtriochtan. The film shows the ways in which some of the ways of working, which were present in their nascent form in Achtriochtan had now become an established part of our research practice. The footage for the film was captured during archaeological survey work at Ba cottage on Rannoch Moor and then at Achnambeithach on the edge of Loch Achtriochtan. The dual locations emphasise links across the landscape and represent the building discomfort within the project of thinking about discrete sites within what would always have been (and still is) a deeply interconnected landscape. This is a film of water. The Tarbh-uisge (the mythical water bull of Loch Achtriochtan) is present throughout the film and views of broken windows and deep peated wetlands across Rannoch Moor are of a landscape in which (to quote Lizzie in the film) ‘it is hard to tell what is solid ground and what is liquid ground’. It is also a film of experience- this is not a representation of a landscape but a representation of being within a landscape, which by this time, we had become very familiar. This was another composed film built around Lizzie’s score. This film was shot with conventional cameras and with the camera obscura. Conventional footage was heavily manipulated and augmented using a mix of analogue and digital post-processing including the overlay of animation and illustration by Nicole. The film has been produced for display within the turf house during the 2025 field season and will also be shown outdoors at live screening events on Rannoch Moor.

Gareth: The significance to me of this film as an artefact of the Glencoe project is that it is probably one of the first times that I started to feel really uncomfortable about the work we were doing. Up till now my interest in creative practice had sat firmly alongside, and been scaffolded by more conventional approaches to archaeological practice. This had allowed me to explore the affordances of creative practice well always retaining a foothold within objectives and research aims which had been formulated using more or less conventional archaeological reasoning. For me at least, this was the first output which was unequivocally about creative practice in its purest sense, decoupled from empirical archaeological methodologies and epistemologies and operating independently, a distinct form of practice in which deeper knowledge and understanding of the subject was an emergent property of the work. In short, this was the moment that elements of our work began to transgress boundaries between practice-based and practice-led research. This created a conflict between the work we were doing and the expectations of conventional archaeological practice which increasingly felt like they were being imposed on our work from the outside, by the expectations of academic systems and institutions. During the creation of this film we had a lot of discussions about this tension and about the need for self-organising communities of practice and mutual aid within the discipline of archaeology, providing a source of resilience and advocating for new ways of conceptualising and valuing the work which we do. These discussions were informed by a broader interest within the Glencoe project in ecological thought including ideas of ‘conviviality’ advocated by Michael Given (Given 2017) and concepts of ‘social ecology’ developed by Murray Bookchin (Clark 1997; Bookchin 2022). Which also allowed us to situate our work and our place within the discipline of archaeology within a broader human-ecological project. These ideas helped to understand the new understanding of the landscape which we were reaching through our creative work, of human and non-human, of pastness and present, of material and mythtic, all co-present appearing and fading from view. This film is a meditation on some of these themes, of the embodied experience of being within, and trying to build common understanding with, an enormously complex landscape with so many layers of human and non-human intentionality.

Lizzie: The day Gareth took the footage for this film on Rannoch Moor was quite a memorable part of the creative journey behind this work. Emboldened by the various fieldtrips to boggy places with the Discipline-Hopping Peatlands & Wetlands Group (Whitehouse et al., 2025), I wanted to trial my radio installation (briefly mentioned in the section above) at the dot on the map marked as Bà Cottage, and so in August 2022 we followed an estate track across Rannoch Moor that led us to a stretch of the West Highland Way and the ruins of this old hunting lodge. I remember setting up the FM transmitters and radio, just I had done at Achtriachtan, but struggling to tune into anything recognisable as a composition, just this loud, grumbling static. Something about the stone of the cottage really messed up with the transmitters. Then suddenly, a tinny, arcade-style version of my plucked violin melody came across the airwaves.

It was the first real sense I got of the technological tools I was using acting of their own accord, reacting to the environment, and having agency in the compositions I was creating. There was something about the soundscape that they had created that was haunting and unsettling. I feel that this is echoed in the footage that Gareth captured that day – views of Bà cottage and the path leading up to it. Views through a crumbling window-frame, with something that looks like a shadowy figure in the corner. The vignetting-effect of the camera obscura emphasises this unease for me, with there always being something out of frame, darkness bleeding in from the edges.

I wanted the composition to emphasise this darkness, to surround the audience with the bog, and so the piece begins and ends with the sounds of water and peat. The rumbling, bassy notes of bubbles, picked up by my hydrophone and lowered down a few octaves; the slowed down sound of a peat core being extracted from the ground. I always think this last recording has a textural quality to it, the smoothness of the peat, the crunch of the metal corer, the gurling of the water, the snapping of roots from the upper layers. It felt as though I was hearing the sound of a forest being torn down and levelled.

Feelings of unease are echoed in some of the songs and stories around Gaelic folklore that I was exploring at the time. Barbara Fairweather, of whom Nicole and I had featured in our stop-motion film, wrote and published a series of pamphlets in the 1970s, and in one of them, ‘Highland Folk Lore’ there are some sections on fairy beasts that inhabit parts of Glencoe and Rannoch Moor, including the Water horse, or Each Uisge, and the Water bull, or Tarbh Uisge (Fairweather, 1974, pp. 5–6). The Each Uisge typically appears to humans as either a very fine horse or sometimes a handsome man. In most tales it lures unsuspecting victims into watery depths or hidden dells and, often too late, the unsuspecting victim realises that it’s actually a water horse from the tell-tale signs of kelp trailing out of his mouth, or sand and water in his hair. Fairweather tells us that Loch Achriochtan, featured in our film, has stories associated with it of the Tarbh Uisge, or water bull, living within its depths. Unlike the water horse, it seems to be fairly harmless to humans, although it is known for eating its way through crops and interbreeding with their cattle, creating weak offspring (Fairweather, 1974).

Inspired by these tales of fairy beasts, I looked on Tobar an Dualchais for any stories associated with both the Each Uisge and the Tarbh Uisge, and came across a recording of the song A’ Ghaoil Leig Dhachaigh Gu M’ Mhàthair Mì, sung by Kate Nicolson (patronymic – Ceit Phàdraig Mhòir) of South Uist (Nicolson, 1954). The song, A’ Ghaoil Leig Dhachaigh Gu m’ Mhàthair Mi, is about a girl, on the edge of the cattlefold, pleading with a handsome stranger, or perhaps the Each Uisge, to let her return home, back to her mother. It’s a compelling, unsettling sort of song. Whilst we don’t hear Kate’s performance within this film, her voice haunts the sound of the violin, as I attempt to match some of her cadences and emphasis with my bow strokes.

Within this is a cautionary tale about strangers, a fear of the unknown, and about the boundaries between what is familiar and what lies beyond. When I first started working in Glencoe and Rannoch Moor, I felt as though I was a bit of an incoming stranger, and felt anxiety about not wanting to impose my views upon this landscape. However, what emerged through the process of making and performing these pieces was how much the landscape seeps in regardless.

Nicole: In the film, the illustrations are made from traces of the land of the moor. I created grayscale digital images, from photographed artworks. These included captured shadows and silhouettes, made and found art materials, and sketched observations of Rannoch-rush, bog cotton, sphagnum mosses, common heather, deer grass, cross-leaved heath, peaty soil, and water from the streams, blanket bog, and soakaways. Blanket bog and wet heath communities (Proctor, 2020) are reflected in the textures made with water and ink as well as flora from Glencoe such as mountain fern and deer fern. The illustrations are imbued with movement in conversation with the bog. At the edges of Rannoch Moor, downy birch and eared willow grow on the riverbanks, and their small, discarded twigs and sticks were used to form brushes for the artworks. I used these natural found materials to create the drawings and this fed into the collaborative digital output.

The artists book that I use as an example of my practice is analogue in its materiality, but the methods used are informed by my established use of computational photography to record artefacts. I used often the same ways of seeing to make decisions about the limits of drawings, to choose how to frame an image as I saw it, and what I then chose to record. The mark making that I translated into digital to overlay or provide texture in the film Rannoch, was also informed by my digital practice. I have been using and teaching digital recording for archaeology for over 20 years, and this unavoidably shapes how I approach close analysis of things that I intend to record. The drawings that are woven into the film were created as a high-fidelity record of an object in the same way that other methods I use, such as photographs for photogrammetry or polynomial texture mapping, might be. Instead, the intention is to record the moment of contact and extend that moment onto the paper. The capture is still active as there is nothing passive about the activity of drawing, but the motivation is imbued more explicitly with values and memory of my own personal contact with the thing.

Central to this capture is the embodiment that takes place when a drawing is coming into being. Throughout the process of deciding to draw something, spending time looking at that thing, and then observing details whilst making marks, a relationship develops between the subject and the observer. This puts me in mind of Kimmerer’s notion of the web of reciprocity as she writes about indigenous uses of moss (2003). Having grown up in a coastal environment in the south of England, each drawing session in the Highlands leads to a process of searching and identification once I get home in order to name things. I often do not know what I have drawn until hours later when I leaf through field guides for flora and fauna. Using materials that I foraged from my environs began as an attempt to even out the passive nature of the activity of drawing, to weave in discarded parts of those other beings amongst the drawings or indeed to create the marks with them: Sitting next to a fern shapes my response to the paper on my lap. Lizzie and I have had several conversations about environmental composition and Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk and the way in which each recording from environment is a moment in time made up of the materials of its surroundings (Westerkamp, 2002). My own drive to acknowledge the context of the drawing event in my compositions aligns to this and has developed into a need to work with what is around me to enrich the drawings that I make and to maintain the connection back to the moment of drawing itself.

Part 5 - What Next for Archaeological Representation?

In this, the final section of our paper, we return to the question at the heart of this paper; ‘What Next for Archaeological Representation?’. This paper has constituted a journey, passing first, in Part 2, through our broad community of practice, the work that underpins and feeds our own and which provides the intellectual and creative context for this paper. We then stopped in Part 3 to talk about our own practice journeys, our discontent with established praxes of archaeology and our individual efforts to develop new ways of thinking about and doing archaeology with creative practice. Then, in Part 4, we reflected upon the transformative impact of collaboration and how, by building a community of practice and a support network, we were able to develop our work in new ways, co-creating a new archaeological creative practice. In different ways, each of these analyses and reflections is highly specific and personal, so how can they prepare us to address something as deep and broad as the future of representation in archaeology?

It is our belief that any meaningful commentary on the future of our sub-discipline must come from a place of specificity and, more than this, it must be informed by nuanced understandings of positionality and practice. The analysis presented below of our own work and the things that we have learned is the primary output of the creative work we have undertaken over the past five years working at Glencoe, but it is also reflective of our practice journeys to this point and of the community of practice to which we belong. Drawing upon the specificities of Glencoe we are able to extrapolate themes and ideas which are of profound significance to disciplinary practice more broadly and which should be of use to others embarking on similarly experimental journeys. The ideas presented below are starting points for a disciplinary conversation in which creative digital archaeologies are fully recognised as contributing to archaeological practice and thought but also challenging many established assumptions regarding knowledge creation, ways of knowing within and beyond the discipline and the role of archaeology within contemporary academic and creative cultures.

Technological Practice

The Glencoe project was an exercise in re-configuring the relationship between archaeology and technology. Despite being normalised across most of the discipline, the relationship between digital technologies and archaeological creative practice is still poorly understood. The project provided an opportunity to probe this relationship and to actively consider the impact which agencies embodied within digital technologies were exerting on our work. More than this, the project provided a space within which to establish forms of technologically mediated practice within the discipline, including the creation of new technologies and the appropriation and re-use of others.

Perhaps the most revealing route into thinking about some of these innovations in practice is through an examination of the interplay and tension between analogue and digital technologies within our work. In Gareth and Lizzie’s case this involved new approaches to the use of digital technologies, including the use of analogue and handmade hardware. For Nicole, this was a blending of digital/analogue approaches to drawing practice. These strategies appear to be transgressive in the sense that the technologies being used are ‘old’ but the practice being employed is innovative and experimental. In fact, if we refer back to Lizzie’s work at Glencoe as an example these were site specific interactive media installations, delivered through analogue radios. The interface, that of the analogue FM radio was old, but the nature of the experience, non-linear, interactive, site-specific storytelling was highly contemporary. As Lizzie observed during the completion of her project, these installations rely substantially on technology that is over 100 years old, they have been technologically and legally possible (due to the availability and legalisation of local FM transmitters) for at least 20 years but they depended upon digital design and thinking around the development of locative media which is largely contemporary. Similarly with Gareth’s work, the hand-building of technologically crude cameras as part of a digital film making process, interfered with conventional digital imaging workflows and dispensed with ‘innovation’ as a motivating force, but it retained many of the characteristics of a digital practice, including the use of digital recording and editing. In both instances, these projects have drawn upon contemporary digital practice but have interrogated and modified this practice through the live discourse of practice-based and, increasingly, practice-led enquiry. Nicole acknowledges in her artist’s journey that her drawing practice is shaped by her approach to digital recording, specifically computational photography. This interrogative and critical approach to media and technology is extremely uncommon within archaeology but has formed an important part of contemporary arts practice for many years (Gant and Reilly 2018, Minkin 2016).

By taking a playful, exploratory approach to the use of technology, by breaking out of established archaeological-technological frameworks it became possible to think anew about our use of technology but also about the motivations, shape and scope of archaeological work. Our experiments with technology allowed us to see and hear archaeology in new ways; the hydrophone dropped into the burn or weeks and months of slow watching and re-watching as you create and then edit fragments of footage into a film. These are technologically mediated but deeply human views of archaeology and archaeological process, views which in their humanity, naturally ebb and flow across disciplinary and experiential lines. By drawing upon practice, epistemology and ontology from beyond archaeology, from film making, acoustics, and contemporary art, we were able to undertake archaeology in new registers, connecting to and communing with the creative, ecological and cultural milieu from which we derive so much meaning in the rest of our lives.

This was a healing archaeology, in rejecting the ‘fetishisation’ of digital technologies (Huggett 2004) and of technological innovation as a valid motivator for research we became able to restore the relations within our work between digital and analogue practice and to actively cultivate new ways of doing archaeology which emerged out of this interplay. These archaeologies were fuelled in large part by our drawing upon ways of thinking and working from beyond the discipline, including contemporary art, music and film making and bringing these into our archaeological work. In so doing we drew upon our own skill and intuition as artists and makers and in so doing drew deeply on the personal, recognising our place within archaeological practice and celebrating the contribution which we were able to make.

Theoretically speaking these innovations in archaeological practice resonate with ideas of post-digitality (as discussed in Part 4 of this paper) and Sterne’s (2003) critiques of uncritical appropriation of technology within research and these convergences deserve to be further examined. However, it is important to recognise and to assert that these innovations in practice did not derive from and were not inspired by a desire to emulate theory, nor do we consider them to have been theoretically generative in any direct sense. These were innovations derived from and of significance to the continued development of practice. These experiments in practice can be usefully thought of as collaborations with the agencies embodied within technology. Sometimes, these collaborations were harmonious but often innovation and creativity arose out of resistance and frustration. Examples of this include the construction of a camera to break with digital photographic conventions, the use of analogue interfaces and the use of natural materials and hand drawing as a route into digital animation. This frustration is essential if we are to critically engage with the technologies we use, but it does not necessarily de-value technology, so much as disempower it, reclaiming the creative initiative from the pre-formed routes embedded within the machinery and software which we use.

Practice, especially in its emergent and experimental forms, provides access to new ways of observing, interpreting and knowing and we must remain alive to these new possibilities and resist the temptation to couch them in pre-shaped disciplinary languages and epistemologies. The Glencoe project provided us with the space to develop new forms of digital practice which spoke in their own languages, and which asked their own questions. This was a reflexive and creative archaeology which conversed with empirical and interpretive practices also at work on site, but which generated new kinds of knowledge. Technologically speaking it is important that we are attentive to the machinery of archaeology and that we establish critical and creative discourse and collaboration with the agencies that are embodied therein. But, as we have shown in this paper, creative practice is ideally suited as a means of developing and adopting new stances towards and uses of technology for archaeological purposes. We have shown our workings in this paper and we sincerely hope that these aspects of our work will embolden archaeologists to develop new and experimental forms of technologically mediated practice and encourage the discipline as a whole to begin to take creative practice more seriously, not as an ancillary activity but as a generative, knowledge building culture which exists (and has always existed) at the heart of the archaeological project.

Ecological Practice

The boundaries between archaeology and ecology have always been highly porous and permeable as evidenced by work outlined in Parts 1 and 2 of our paper (Bozdog 2020, Gant and Reilly 2018). Our technologically mediated creative practice created new opportunities to explore the interplay between these areas of study. Our work increasingly straddled this boundary as we sought to interrogate the relationships between human presence, material culture and environment. The connectedness of ecology and archaeology were important to our work at Glencoe, but this also provides an example of the broader ways in which innovations in digital practice can be used to build connections and worry at distinctions between disciplines in ways which are entirely unique. The hybridity of our eco-archaeological digital practice could just as easily be replicated across other disciplinary or other cultural boundaries.

The practice of film making which we developed within the Glencoe project was derived from Gareth’s pre-existing film work, but it develops a distinctive character which is indicative of the ways in which the kinds of creative practice which we are proposing might transform digital archaeology. Initial experiments with the camera obscura provided mediated views of landscape, rendered quite alien by distorted, refracted and hazy images. Sitting, as they did, well outside of the naturalistic conventions of archaeological photography and film making, these views of the land created space for imagining and interpretation. Seeing the view ahead in shifting configurations of shape, colour and line, watching as it re-composes itself and reveals different facets as light, cloud, water and animal life move through the field of view. The archaeology is co-present within all of this, a constituent part of this eco-system not just of value as a mechanism for understanding the human past but as fragments of human agency acting upon and being acted upon by other non-human agencies, just as they have for centuries. We sat for hours, filming and talking, just as Nicole spent time sketching whilst talking with those around her about the subject of the drawings. This slowness enabled attentiveness and the close observation of the landscape. Through this practice of presence, we noticed archaeological features which may have escaped the attention of a rapidly conducted survey, and we observed the interplay between natural and material cultures as they went about their business.

Film making is not alone in providing these opportunities for attentiveness but does so in unique ways. The process did not end in the field. Back in the workshop, office or train, these images were edited into montages, watched again and again, sped up, slowed down, cropped, edited and trimmed, and sketches digitised and overlayed onto footage, so that the images acquired layers of interpretation and meaning. Every time the film was watched part of the mind and part of the body was present again in the glen. During rewatching, Nicole used the raw and edited footage to create new artworks as details prompted memories from the glen, that were then added as editing occurred. With every re-watching new patterns and themes emerged and developed. The end result is a deep fusion of agencies, geological, technological, faunal, human, conscious and dream like. All of these contributed to the form of the final films, and all are present within them.

Recording and sound work add another facet to our practice. Close listening, particularly using digital recording technologies such as shotgun microphones, hydrophones and contact microphones to access more-than-human aspects of the eco-system, enabled new and unfamiliar understandings of the environment to emerge. The sound ecologist Bernie Krause talks about how using his microphone feels like using other technologies that enhance his human abilities; like the binoculars that help him see further away, listening through his microphone his sense of hearing, what he is able to hear, is heightened and improved – “I didn’t feel like I was listening as a distant observer; rather, I had been sucked into a new space – becoming an integral part of the experience itself” (Krause, 2012, p. 15)

The practice of using microphones in Glencoe and Rannoch Moor allowed for a scaling down of focus – from the macro of the landscape to the microworld of the bog, or of lichen communities on the stone foundations of 18th century farmsteads. For sound artist Jez Riley French, he describes his use of these types of microphones as a means to “get close to the source of the sound, to almost get underneath the sound” (Quoted in: Lane and Carlyle, 2013: 163), a sentiment not unlike act of excavation itself: burrowing into the earth to find what lies beneath.

The act of listening and recording can bring an attentiveness to place and the entangled relationships between human and more-than-human actors (Clancy, 2019, p. 109). It also brings an attentiveness to the entanglement of present and past. Archaeology is so infused with the digital that to listen to archaeology and to consider the significance of what you are hearing, can open up entirely new ways of thinking about the past and, consequently, entirely new research agendas. In listening, it was not possible to conceive of material culture outside of the plant life, animal life and geology within which it has been preserved. The archaeology of Rannoch Moor and Glencoe is an archaeology of peat, of heather, of stone and to hear these entities interacting, living, decomposing and eroding emphasises the perpetual interconnectedness of all these things. It is also possible to hear change, the bleeting arrival of the sheep and the silence of the loss of the woods. Landscape compositions of the type which are a feature of Rannoch and Achtriochtan are collaborations with the environment, with phrasing, rhythm and metre dictated by the sounds found within the landscape, created by human and non-human agencies. It was difficult, while engaging in this kind of collaborative practice, to reconcile with anthropocentric and empiricist ideas of periodisation, rather, our practice of sound seemed to suggest, to insist upon connectedness.

The creative practice of drawing further builds on this idea of connectedness. Nicole’s work explores the connection between ecology and archaeology explicitly in its themes and imagery, but it also has an implicit examination of how creative practice, mark-making in particular, embeds awareness of ecology into our interpretation of what is around us. The creative practice of digital archaeology helped us to reconnect archaeological enquiry and ecological enquiry in ways that enable us to more fully understand the human experience of dwelling within the landscape. Drawing whilst amongst the archaeology enabled a building consciousness of the materiality of the environment, as slow observation occurred and was iteratively built upon for each drawing session. Nicole created representations in order to tell a story of the archaeology, in the same way as the storytelling occurred through Lizzie’s soundscapes and Gareth’s films. However, these drawings made use of the materiality of the environment itself, being made up of the moments that they represented.

In addition to imbuing drawings with traces of the ecology of the place, Nicole’s practice evolved to inform the way that she uses digital technologies. Through connecting the drawings, films, and sounds in the Rannoch film the environment itself is brought into the digital storytelling. We worked in collaboration with the environment to develop new forms of digital archaeological practice. Central to this shift in practice, and as Nicole reflects in her Practice Journey, in taking a holistic approach to the situatedness of the individual within the landscape and acknowledging connections with other people and things, we can undertake an embodied creative practice.

Our experiences operating across the lines of archaeology and ecology in the development of a hybrid practice constitutes an illustration of the different ways of knowing afforded by the creative use of digital technologies. There has been a tendency from very early in the history of discourse around digital archaeology to cast digital technologies as having the intrinsic capacity to deceive by decoupling representational practice from embodied experience (Thomas 2009; Miller & Richards 1996). Our work suggests that these fears have proven themselves to be largely unfounded and that, if approached in a critical and mindful way, digital forms of representation can provide entirely new ways of engaging with ecologies of archaeological practice of which humans represent a significant part. What is more, digital technologies can provide mechanisms to mediate between human understandings, material culture and the natural world by providing novel perspectives and opportunities for practice which lead to new modes of understanding.

Through creative work we arrived at forms of practice which were attentive to human pasts but very much within the context of the natural world and which sought to understand the interplay between people and past and present and the ecosystems within which we exist.

A Creative Practice of Archaeology

The development of a creative practice of archaeology represents a significant challenge within contemporary archaeological practice and is something which has been discussed extensively, including in the body of literature presented in Part 2 of this paper. However, experiments in creative practice, undertaken by archaeologists and/or as a core part of the archaeological process, are in their very early stages and insufficient attention has been paid to the role of digital technologies in an archaeological creative practice. Nor do we yet understand the impact which an archaeological creative practice might have upon our relationship with and use of digital technologies within our work. The research presented within this paper, both our own autoethnographic practice journeys and our individual and collaborative work at Glencoe, has provided a deep insight into the development of such a creative practice.

In approaching these challenges through practice rather than theory, we have exposed the essential messiness of creative practice and have dwelt upon the complex entanglements between archaeology as an embodied and theorised practice, broader conceptions of the self, and the ecologies (creative, social and environmental) within which these interactions take place. In our experimental approach to media practice within the Glencoe Project we found that our work naturally spilled across conventional disciplinary boundaries. It flowed into other disciplines, mixing freely with wider cultures of film making practice, education, performance art and sound production. It also flowed on another axis, into the personal: Lizzie’s practice of composition, Nicole’s creation of an autobiographical record through on-site sketches and photographs, and Gareth’s use of wood and metal craft which drew upon multi-generational family inheritances of knowledge. The outputs of this work, as shown in Part 4 of this paper are crystallisations of the convergence of these different kinds of expertise. This rejection of disciplinary constraints through the use of a consciously and increasingly practice-led methodology led to the re-casting of our representational work as something hybrid and ‘other’ to conventional archaeological work.

Our creative methods, and the ways in which they sit alongside other methods at work within the project, have emerged as the project has progressed and have taken on a unique and transient identity. We have shaped each other and been shaped by each other and we have in turn been shaped by our wider identities and experiences, drawing upon our cultural and creative hinterlands of (among other things) film making, music production, contemporary art, and book illustration to contribute towards the construction of new collaborative ways of working and new ways of doing archaeology. As such, the attempt to reject disciplinary constraints within our work is internal as much as it is external, and it extends beyond interdisciplinarity into the development of a practice and epistemology of digital archaeology which embraces the fullness of each person’s experience and recognises the diverse ways in which our experiences of archaeology are entangled with our broader experiences and cultural identities.

This fluidity of approach and a willingness to treat method and epistemology as emergent properties of archaeological work has characterised all of our careers to this point and we propose that this style of practice-based, reflexive archaeological work represents an important addition to the future of archaeology. By creating a state of restless, searching methodological creativity, we have the potential to make archaeology into a more inclusive discipline. Loosening the grip of established methods and epistemologies has the potential to create a space within which to imagine archaeology anew, as a discipline which serves the needs of contemporary archaeologists and the cultures and societies within which we operate.

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