There simply isn t the same passion in other fields of archaeology. For example, in BAR we ve run three articles on the precise location on the Temple Mount where the temple was, and each of them is slightly different. People care about that in a way they certainly don t care about whether the temple on the Roman Forum was here or there or some other place. In the old days, archaeology was more of a treasure hunt. You were looking for pieces that would go to museums.
Today there s a major shift.
We re trying to understand ancient life. We re trying to understand how ordinary people lived, not necessarily pharaohs and kings, what the ordinary people ate, from what they died, how they earned a living. In order to learn these things you can retrieve old grain, bones of animals and fish, pots that are otherwise uninteresting. You retrieve old pollen, even fecal material, coprolites. With the computer you can deal with millions of little factlets, creating the danger you re going to be overrun by all your data, drowned in detail, because there s no limit on operations that can be performed to examine possible implications of the data.