Assembling situated knowledges in contemporary archaeology: three-dimensional imaging in the Cherish Project
Keywords: situated knowledge
digital heritage
archaeology
digital visualisation
heritage
drones
digital geography
geo-spatial technology

This thesis addresses the need within geographical scholarship — and the social sciences, more broadly — for new conceptual tools to better understand digital mediations of heritage. In particular, it considers the epistemic and ontological consequences of translating the "archaeological record"—i.e., the "material" components of human history — into digital contexts. Geo-spatial visualising technologies are being used more and more extensively within contemporary archaeology and heritage sciences. With increasing frequency, archaeologists are using methods like drone-based photogrammetry (UAV survey), laser scanning, LiDAR, and more to develop new methods for research as well as public-facing historical reconstructions. Often these methods resolve in robust digital visual "objects" ranging from 3D models to digital elevation maps (DEMs), which can serve to illustrate findings or hypotheses, to assist in morphological analyses, or as tools for interpretive learning. These outputs are filling up screens across classrooms, lecture halls, galleries, and museums alike. In many respects they are changing how archaeological knowledges are now produced, circulated, and articulated.
As digital heritage visualisations increasingly come to function as surrogates for threatened heritage sites and objects, efforts to critically theorise the production and/or use of such objects — particularly as it pertains to the types of knowledges they carry — remain underdeveloped. This thesis contends that digitally visualised archaeological knowledges must be understood not only as socio-material constructs, but as emergent through both the socio-technical assemblages inherent to their production and the situated material engagements practitioners perform in order to render them.
The thesis takes as its case study the Cherish Project: a collaborative EU-funded research initiative designed to monitor the impacts of climate change on coastal heritage sites in both Ireland and Wales. It is particularly centred on the project's stated aim of delivering a comprehensive baseline of 3D data for the continued management of eroding heritage landscapes. Utilising theoretical concepts derived from literatures on assemblage theory, situated knowledges, agential realism, and the ontologies of digital objects this thesis performs a detailed analysis of three of the Cherish project's prescribed methodological workflows; namely, UAV survey, laser scanning, and analytic walkover earthwork survey. It traces the production of Cherish data from their initial acquisition, subsequent processing in secondary stages of post-production, and eventual cohesion as digital objects with prescribed uses. In so doing it reveals the production of digital heritage visualisations — and the knowledges they ultimately carry — as being crucially defined and shaped by the spatial, relational, and situated configuration of the components assembled in their production.