Citizen Science; Amateur Archaeology; Crowd-sourced data; scatter vision; tunnel vision

As part of the “CAA Webcasts” series, an exciting lecture on “Public Archaeology” by Dr. Karl Hjalte Maack Raun from the Museum Horsens in Denmark took place on January 21, 2022. The German sectoin of the international “Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology” has been offering participation in virtual lectures and short tutorials on the CAA-de website for some time, which concisely present special topics in the field of digital archaeology and archaeoinformatics.

The talk was looking at the current practice of archaeology in Denmark and focuses on the trajectory of incorporative and interdisciplinary archaeology in Denmark, for and with the public. Thus also question best-practice for future archaeological institutions and how to progress archaeological knowledge. Related to this, it was discussed how to diversify vision from scattered or tunneled vision, towards something that incorporates a multidimensional and interdisciplinary approach in order to create archaeology, for and with the public. Furthermore, the talk was questioned what the existential purpose and intent of archaeology really is: documentation or mediation.

The speaker Karl Hjalte Maack Raun received his PhD in 2017 from Heidelberg University at the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context as a member of the junior research group Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage with the topic: LiDAR based semi-automatic pattern recognition within an archaeological landscape. As an archaeoinformatician, he is now researching landscape archaeological issues at the Museum Horsens of the Ministry of Culture Denmark, especially in the context of numerous systematic site surveys.

The slides from the talk can be downloaded from the following link: Public Archaeology talk by K.H.M. Raun, January 2022