Archiving Knowledge : Digital Materialities, Affordances, and Challenges in Opening up Digital 3D Data for Reuse

Archaeology’s turn to digital documentation poses questions for the long-term preservation of archaeological data and their future re-use—questions that have relevance also for the debates about open science and data archivization in the natural and social sciences. In this paper, I investigate how the nexus of epistemology and digital materialities affect attempts to open up archaeological data for future users. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and text analysis, I show how the epistemological positions assumed by archaeologists in relation to epistemic virtues such as objectivity, interpretation, and transparency lead them to adopt diverging understandings of what the material affordances and limitations of digital 3D technology mean for the value and feasibility of opening up digital archaeological data. Supported by the analysis, I argue that the contemporary debate about data reuse and archiving in archaeology offers valuable insights into questions of openness, reuse, and archivization across the sciences. First, because the arguments put forth in the debate highlight important obstacles on the road to open data, and second, because the frictions that arise when archives designed to house physical things are confronted with digital objects make visible the translations involved in transforming epistemic objects into archivable entities.