Professor Graham trained in Roman archaeology but has become over the years a digital archaeologist and digital humanist.
For more details, please see his faculty page. His most recent book, An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent-Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence is an exploration of the use of computation in archaeology as a kind of magic, a way of heightening the archaeological imagination. Agent-based modelling allows archaeologists to test the ‘just-so’ stories they tell about the past. It requires a formalization of the story so that it can be represented as a simulation; researchers are then able to explore the unintended consequences or emergent outcomes of stories about the past. Agent-based models are one end of a spectrum that, at the opposite side, ends with video games. This volume explores this spectrum in the context of Roman archaeology, addressing the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of a formalized approach to computation and archaeogaming.
…and this course is built on a lot of the material he collected while writing that volume.
Contact: shawn dot graham at carleton dot ca.
