Assembling a site of acquisition: knowledge production and drone survey at Dunbeg Fort

Abstract

Geo-spatial visualising technologies are finding dynamic articulation within contemporary archaeology. With increasing regularity, archaeologists are using methods like drone-based photogrammetry to construct immersive spaces for research, analysis, and public-facing historical reconstructions. The rate at which they have been folded into the discipline, however, has outpaced efforts to critically theorise them. Too often these “new” forms of archaeological media are handled unreflexively. Often they are presented as easily knowable or self evident. This paper attends to what it identifies as the contingencies inherent to the production of such media. Using theorists like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, it specifically attends to notions of “partial objectivity”, “situated knowledges” and “embodiment in contemporary archaeological practice. Centred around a series of observations conducted as part of an ethnography of the Discovery Programme’s involvement in the Cherish Project (a collaborative EU funded research initiative designed to monitor the impacts of climate change on coastal heritage sites in Ireland and Wales), it targets processes of data acquisition for photogrammetric modelling at the site of Dunbeg Fort in Co. Kerry, Ireland.