| Summary: | As a “grand challenge” for digital archaeology, I propose the adoption of programmatic research
to meet the challenges of archaeological curation in the digital continuum, contingent on curation-enabled
global digital infrastructures, and on contested regimes of archaeological knowledge production and
meaning making. My motivation stems from an interest in the sociotechnical practices of archaeology,
viewed as purposeful activities centred on material traces of past human presence. This is exemplified
in contemporary practices of interpretation “at the trowel’s edge”, in epistemological reflexivity and in
pluralization of archaeological knowledge. Adopting a practice-centred approach, I examine how the
archaeological record is constructed and curated through archaeological activity “from the field to the
screen” in a variety of archaeological situations. I call attention to Çatalhöyük as a salient case study
illustrating the ubiquity of digital curation practices in experimental, well-resourced and purposefully
theorized archaeological fieldwork, and I propose a conceptualization of digital curation as a pervasive,
epistemic-pragmatic activity extending across the lifecycle of archaeological work. To address these
challenges, I introduce a medium-term research agenda that speaks both to epistemic questions of theory
in archaeology and information science, and to pragmatic concerns of digital curation, its methods,
and application in archaeology. The agenda I propose calls for multidisciplinary, multi-team, multiyear
research of a programmatic nature, aiming to re-examine archaeological ontology, to conduct focused
research on pervasive archaeological research practices and methods, and to design and develop curation
functionalities coupled with existing pervasive digital infrastructures used by archaeologists. It has a
potential value in helping to establish an epistemologically coherent framework for the interdisciplinary
field of archaeological curation, in aligning archaeological ontologies work with practice-based, agencyoriented
and participatory theorizations of material culture, and in matching the specification and design
of archaeological digital infrastructures with the increasingly globalized, ubiquitous and pervasive digital
information environment and the multiple contexts of contemporary meaning-making in archaeology.
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