Digital Design Studio

The aim of ACCORD is to examine the opportunities and implications of digital visualisation technologies for community engagement and research through the co-design and co-production of 3D models of historic monuments and places. The Project also aims to reflect on the nature of the relationships between community groups, digital heritage professionals, and the outputs they have created, particularly in comparison to similar outputs produced in more traditional professional domains. The participation of interested communities in the design process will allow contemporary social values associated with heritage places to be explored and embedded in the resulting digital records and 3D objects. Finally, the ACCORD Project team will investigate changes in attitude to 3D recording technologies during the life of the project, as well as the forms of significance, authenticity, and value acquired by the resulting 3D objects

The ACCORD project explores opportunities and implications of community co-production of 3D heritage site records.
The ACCORD team worked with a group of rock-climbers at the site of Dumbarton Rock (colloquially referred to as ‘Dumby’) from the 8th to 10th of July this summer. Our focus was not the historic Castle which sits atop this volcanic plug, rather together we recorded and modelled a particular aspect of the Dumbarton Rock cliff face and some of the boulders, which are the focus of the climbers’ activities. We used photogrammetry and RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) and laser scanning to record aspects of the sporting heritage of Dumby. This collaborative paper is the outcome of a longer term engagement and discussion which has emerged from this work. The role of 3D recording and modelling in expressing and creating value attached to the monuments will be discussed.
Here we will put the 3D recording undertaken in context, specifically as a site of contested sporting heritage. This loved edgeland, in all its grittiness, is the main actor in the relationships established here. Additionally, climbers have a rich body of knowledge. Creating 3D records of their climbing heritage has facilitated a means of sharing this knowledge, a step towards fulfilling their aim to legitimise this place as a site of historical importance. ‘Beta’ is the colloquial climbing term used to refer to the knowledge that must be unlocked in order to succeed and complete a bouldering problem or climbing route.  But as we hope we make clear in this presentation it also has relevance for understanding the success of our collaboration.
ACCORD (Archaeology Community Coproduction of Research Data) is funded by the AHRC under the Connected Communities stream and is a 15 month partnership between the Digital Design Studio at the Glasgow School of Art, Archaeology Scotland, the University of Manchester and the RCAHMS. For more information check out our blog www.accordproject.wordpress.com or twitter @ACCORD_project.

This paper introduces the AHRC funded ACCORD project, a partnership between the Digital Design Studio at the Glasgow School of Art, Archaeology Scotland, the University of Manchester and the RCAHMS. The ACCORD project examines the opportunities and implications of digital visualisation technologies for community engagement and research through the co-creation of 3D models of historic monuments and places. Despite their increasing accessibility, techniques such as laser scanning, 3D modelling and 3D printing have remained firmly in the domain of heritage specialists. Expert forms of knowledge and/or professional priorities frame the use of digital visualisation technologies and forms of community-based social value are rarely addressed. Consequently, the resulting digital objects fail to engage communities as a means of researching and representing their heritage. The first part of this paper presents how the ACCORD project seeks to address this gap through the co-design and co-production of an integrated research asset that encompasses social value and engages communities with transformative digital technologies. The second half of this paper (section 4) presents a case study of an ACCORD project based in Argyll which highlights the nature of community relations with expert groups, issues of archaeological authority and the transformative power of co-production using digital recording techniques.

The Glenmorangie Early Medieval Research Project recreated
objects from the period 300-900 AD in collaboration with artists, designers and makers. A combination of contemporary and traditional craft was used and were informed directly by the archaeological evidence. This collaborative process of re-creation has allowed us to experience these ancient objects as new, giving us insights into how they were made, experienced and used.

This co-authored paper explores one of these collaborative projects; the design and making of a Pictish inspired drinking horn fitting using traditional as well as integrated digital techniques. We will begin by laying out the motivations behind the re-creation.

Then, in turn, each of us will reflect on the process and insights made along the way (the designer and the archaeologist).

Recurring themes are; the need for transparency in collaboration, 'Pictish problem-solving' in contemporary
process-led learning and authenticity.

Session proposal for TAG 2015 in Bradford, 14th-16th of December 2015.

Traditional models of social organisation and production stress the development of stratification and the emergence of hierarchies of power and settlement; whether for example early Bronze Age elites or later Bronze Age ‘great enclosures’, hillforts versus ‘open’ settlements in the middle Iron Age, the dramatic increase of artefacts and materialities apparently emphasising social stratification in some regions during the later Iron Age, or the development of towns, villas and farmsteads during the Roman occupation. But does the archaeological evidence still support such meta-narratives of social organisation and production? The past 30 years have seen an explosion in the amount of data available to archaeologists in Britain, through the work of extensive aerial survey work such as the National Mapping Programme, the results of developer-funded archaeology, and the results of large-scale research such as EngLaId (the English Landscapes and Identities project) and The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain project. From the prehistoric through to the early medieval periods in the British Isles, this work has all highlighted the much greater inter-regional and intra-regional diversity in settlement forms, burial and ritualised practices, material culture use and production, in some instances expressed at quite localised or small-scale levels.

As an alternative to traditional hierarchical meta-narratives, heterarchy (Crumley 2005) is a powerful theoretical concept. It is defined as “the relationship of elements to one another when they are unranked, or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways” (ibid: 36). Over the past two decades, heterarchy has been embraced to explain the dynamism of power relationships in world archaeological cultures, where traditional models of social evolution and hierarchy do not work (e.g. case-studies in Mesoamerica, Joyce and Hendon 2000; or pre-Hispanic Northwest Argentina, DeMarrais 2013), though the concept has also been criticised in the past for being too loosely applied and not sufficiently theorised (e.g. Thomas 1994).

The variety of inter-relationships between people, place and materials are increasingly archaeologically visible in the British Iron Age for example. Material culture analyses reveal complex relationships between different crafts and consumption practices – as with the fragmentary and distributed evidence for iron working, absence of standardisation and localised smithing in the middle to late Iron Age in south-east and central England, which has been argued by Ehrenreich (1995) to represent a distributed access to materials and alienable crafting know-how, and therefore geographically distributed power. Giles (2007: 400) has emphasised how the performance of craft activities and depositional practices enacts the fluid and dynamic transfer of political and ritual authority in social organisation.

We invite papers from all periods which explore alternatives to traditional hierarchical models of development, and which explore or celebrate diversity, fluidity and complexity in social organisation and/or ontology. We welcome proposals from any time or place.

Themes papers could explore include:

• Can diversity of form in the record be equated to plurality of practice?
• How can we build models of the evidence which make sense of the reality of past ‘messy’ relationships that make up social organisations, and are theories or models of heterarchy useful or appropriate for this end?

• Is a hierarchical versus heterarchical dichotomy even appropriate, or far too simplistic? Did power and authority, structure and agency also vary according to place, context or other factors?

• What other theoretical models (e.g. Ingold’s meshworks, assemblage theory) might also be helpful for understanding alternative social organisations and ontologies, and their development?

• Can more nuanced ethnographic studies offer any insights?


References

Crumley, C.L. 2005. Heterarchy and the analysis of complex societies. Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 6 (1): 1-5.

De Marrais, E. 2013. Understanding heterarchy: crafting and social projects in pre-Hispanic Northwest Argentina. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23 (3): 345-362.

Ehrenreich, R.M. 1995. Early metalworking: a heterarchical analysis of industrial organization. In R.M. Ehrenreich, C.E. Crumley and J. Levy (eds.) Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, pp. 33-39.

Giles, M. 2007. Making metal and forging relations: ironworking in the British Iron Age. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 26 (4): 395-413.

Joyce, R.A. and Hendon, J.A. 2000. Heterarchy, history, and material reality. In M-A Canuto and J. Yaeger (eds.) The Archaeology of Communities: a New World Perspective. London: Routledge, pp. 143-159.

Thomas, J. 1994. AAA annual meeting, Washington DC. Anthropology Today 10 (1): 21.

Linear socio-evolutionism is a powerful trend in Iron Age Western Mediterranean archaeology. It is often, maybe always, assumed that local polities were engaged in a convergence process which would forcefully bring them to fit in the city-state model, rooted
in the Eastern and Central Mediterranean areas, through the classical evolution from Complex Chiefdoms into Archaic States. In this process, native ‘elites’ are thought to play a fundamental role, especially through their coercive capacity which enables them to maintain themselves at the top of the social hierarchies. These hierarchies are tacitly described as quite rigid in their structure all throughout the period. The funerary record provides good hints for such long-term stability – from the 6th century BC to the end of the 3rd century BC, grave goods emphasize rank and gender identities in a rather homogeneous fashion, and highlight
the dominating position of (supposedly) male warriors.
Yet, settlement archaeology provides an interesting alternative insight. In some sites, domestic architecture suggests the existence of a rather static hierarchy, while fluidity seems to prevail in others. This situation appear even more diverse if we compare the time span within which each process can be observed: strong hierarchies mainly characterize short-lived
settlements while fluid situations, ensured through competitive processes, mainly in the sphere of armed violence and, maybe more typically, in the craft area, prevail in those settled
for a long time.
In this presentation, I will propose that the contrast between hierarchy and heterarchy – used here in its political sense – is to be considered in a chronological perspective. At a given moment, it seems likely that a native community appeared to us as well as to itself as strongly hierarchized. But this short term hierarchy appears also as the result of a long term heterarchical process, whose dynamics I will analyse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=5rrQvlcFFYs