Unexpected AI Detectives: Colouring Book Fans

I’ve been interested in what Charles Goodwin calls “professional vision” for a couple of decades now. How do archaeologists learn how to see and understand archaeology? How do they translate and transmit that understanding to others using various media? It’s intrinsic to so much of archaeological knowledge production, particularly with different recording systems.

It’s become increasingly important to media literacy that we all develop a kind of professional vision of a different sort–detecting AI in the media we consume. For archaeological subjects it is generally extremely easy for archaeologists to identify AI, though this will potentially become more difficult as generative AI improves/consumes more archaeology-specific media.

So thinking critically about strategies wherein we can recognise generative-AI in images is incredibly important, particularly within a discipline that relies so heavily on the visual record. I found some unexpected inspiration on reddit, on the adult colouring subreddit. There are continual queries regarding AI colouring books, asking if images are AI, if it matters, and how to detect it within colouring books. It turns out that colouring helps guide and develop a professional vision–it’s another forcing function, as we identified in our paper on the importance of drawing in archaeology. The act of close attention, of colouring in the particular subject, it becomes obvious when the logic of the image does not hang together.

Take, for example, the image in the header. There’s a lot to annoy both the person colouring the page and the archaeologist. The breaks on the jugs don’t really work, the lines around the temple in the middle aren’t enclosed, so are annoying to colour. Though tbh I always fly around in a hot air balloon with a skull on it, so it got that right at least.

In pursuit of efficiency and digital workflows, many archaeological projects now trace photographs instead of drawing outright. There are some pedagogical problems with this, but it might actually help detect AI images to trace them to see if the various objects within the image actually fit together.

I also like the collective approach (I know, I would, right?) wherein people post on a different subreddit, RealOrAI, who have their own set of strategies to detect generative AI imagery and discuss their opinions on the topic.

Anyway, I could have spent some time trying to refine and improve the above image, and elements are fun (weird) and potentially inspirational. But you do lose out on the potential to connect with archaeological knowledge production in a different way. I don’t think it’s ever a waste to try to do something creative with your research, and drawing is a (scientifically proven) invitation for your brain to see and understand the past in new ways. The folks in the colouring subreddit are serious in their attempts to push the medium and represent different materials in new ways.

And who knows? Coco Wyo might just revive the honoured tradition of isometric drawing in archaeology.

Coco Wyo colouring page with isometric representation of a cozy office with a cat.

(this post was not sponsored, but if you want to talk about a cozy archaeology colouring book Coco Wyo hmu)

Museum of Dead Digital Museum Displays

It truly was born from pathos. The first photograph I took was of an apple imac, on a stand, relegated to the corner next to a traditional museum sideboard. It was 2006 at the Hagia Sophia, and I was just beginning to think critically about the life and death of digital things, particularly as I was making them.

I’ve used that particular photo in many lectures, asking students to think of their digital legacies, even while leaving behind my own trail of digital detritus in interpretive media that no longer work.

I have been taking these photos ever since, the dead eyes of terminals serving as memento mori. All things die, and especially digital things.

A dead digital display with a sign that says, "apologies this terminal is deep undercover today and will be back online soon"

The most recent one was taken just a couple of days ago, at the National Archives, in their exhibition on MI5.

I realised that I’ve never shared these images beyond the classroom, so, in true lazy fashion, I’ve made an instagram account. I’ll try to trawl through my deep archives to serve the best and deadest digital displays. And if you are a curator, please don’t take it personally, we’ve all been there.

Dead Digital Museums on Instagram

New Publication – Archaeology as Worldbuilding

After presenting and workshopping this paper since 2023, I’m so happy to finally see it in (open access) print in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. It comes after being fairly disenchanted with the current focus on storytelling in archaeological interpretation, a craft that is rarely effectively deployed and doesn’t adequately exercise the collective nature of assembling and prescencing data in archaeology.

I used examples from past and more recent research, including Çatalhöyük in Second Life, Other Eyes, and the Avebury Papers project to demonstrate how playful, creative questions can transform our research questions and understanding of the past.

The article benefitted from excellent feedback from Dawn Hadley, Gabe Moshenska, Catherine Frieman, Kathryn Killackey, the editors and proofreader and the anonymous peer reviewers. I was also able to discuss some of the concepts with the fab new materialists at Leicester, though much of the relationship of worldbuilding with assemblage theory was lost through the editing process. I’m still (forever) working on a book that is a more comprehensive exploration of some of these concepts, so perhaps it will come out there.

Finally, I’m very excited that I am working on a Worldbuilding game with Aris Politopolous, Kathryn Killackey and Stu Eve to be played at the upcoming TAG 2025 meeting in York.

The citation, until it makes it off online to print:

Morgan C. Archaeology as Worldbuilding. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Published online 2025:1-10. doi:10.1017/S0959774325100164

Elephants Real and Metaphorical at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

The docent at the entrance assumed we were there for the Ozzy Osbourne exhibition. Sure I like Paranoid, but I was after the innovative GIANTS exhibition, full of interactives, 3D prints and life-size schematic models of megafauna. The exhibition was exciting and impressive, demonstrating a still-contested concept in museums, that of the un/necessity of having “real” objects and specimens.

The result was awe-inspiring, the mixed-media use of industrial materials encouraged you to contemplate the scale of the creatures. Though there were certainly digital reconstructions, the schematic models helped to highlight the ambiguity of reconstructions. The paucity of evidence for many of the GIANTS was demonstrated as windows into these models, not undermining the interpretation but showing how much paleontologists could extrapolate from this evidence.

Two museum-goers listening to a movie on the side of a schematic mammoth. There are windows into the schematic that show 3D prints of bones.

Upstairs there was another notable gallery, The Elephant in the Room: the roots and routes of the city’s collection. We were a bit tired and snacky and I was beginning to museum-shuffle, but this Beaded boy’s purse caught me:

A museum display of a beaded purse with an extended caption next to it, described in the blog post.

It is almost-textbook good practice. The museum accession tag was visible, and the caption was in two parts. The first is what you may expect from a “good” museum, the when-who-where-how of its acquisition and importance. The second was a narrative of “The Elephant”– how the object demonstrated the racist, colonial, violent origins of its collection. In this case it was “Taken off a Zulu boy during the Boer War.” Ah.

So I went back and read through the entire exhibition, museum-haze thrown off. My daughter was unimpressed by this development, but when I explained, she too read the captions closely.

There were some general signboards about repatriation and the globalised nature of local collections which contextualised the exhibition, and elevated what could be written off as assorted oddities and cast-offs that did not merit national collections. Excellent, state-of-the-art museum curation and interpretation on both counts. It’s heartening to see amidst Trump’s attacks on the ‘wokeness’ of museums.

It’s difficult to say if museums will go the route of appeasement, like many of the American universities have done already, or if they can lean into their newly conceived practice of transparency and contemplation of their institutional participation in violent, colonial legacies.

Photography & Archaeology in 2025

Happy World Photography day!

I’ve been thinking about digital archaeology and archaeological methods in general as a way to foment intimate connection (no not like that) and prefigure social relations and interpretation. Arguably this began with my work on archaeological photography, inspired by my own practice and taking a class with the brilliant Nancy Van House at UC Berkeley. For my final paper in the class I used methods from Visual Studies to analyse photographs from Çatalhöyük, in a content and semiotic analysis and applied lessons I’d learned to my own practice.

Taking photographs of whole people. Taking photos of people in their power. Asking permission. Working alongside people and earning their trust before taking photos, when I could.

I published the article eight-ish years after I’d originally written it, in Internet Archaeology. There’s more in my thesis, wherein I had an entire chapter written about the many lives of a digital photograph of a coffee pot on an archaeological tell. Learning how to read photographs was an excellent skill, wherein you can get a pretty good idea of the social relations, conditions, and general expertise employed at any archaeological site at a glance.

My photographs have been reusable under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license forever, so I occasionally see them pop up as illustrating news stories or other archaeological items of interest. And they’ve probably been scraped for use in generative AI, which was definitely not envisioned when I received permission to take the photographs in the first place. All of the carefully cultivated relationships built with local site participants, my colleagues, students on fieldwork projects, etc have taken on a different gloss now they’re part of a large, decontextualised training set for facial recognition systems.

A search box to see if IBM used your photos as part of a facial recognition program.

After the rapid proliferation of digital photography and rapid acquisition of good quality digital cameras, there seems to be a general decline in quality and availability of archaeological photography. A recent thread on Reddit asked after good quality cameras to take on fieldwork and most people said they just use their phone. There’s certainly further evidence that photography in archaeology continues to proliferate, even while the quality is reduced. I’ve previously argued that one of the affordances of digital cameras, being able to see the photo before you take it, allowed people to take photos with more strategic care, it seems that the lack of training in photography has overcome that minor advantage. Perhaps even further that archaeological photographs are, fundamentally, visual arguments, and the interpretive heft has been overcome by mechanical practice.

Finally, there are relatively few places to broadly share archaeological photographs. Flickr was great until the business model dictated for the company yell at me about retroactive violations of their upload limit. Wikimedia would be an obvious next choice, and I probably should move my collection of photos over there, perhaps with the Flickr2Commons tool. A lot of the most charismatic photos these days are likely to be shared amongst site participants, in whatsapp groups, and that’s probably fine. But between AI facial recognition tools and the lack of hosting, we’re in danger of becoming an un-faced discipline again, finds and sites divorced from the people who participated in their uncovery.

Finally, my own practice has faltered in recent years, as the demands build up. Digital archaeology is laughably difficult to personalise, with many variations of people pointing at screens, like this photo from the 2024 Heritage Jam:

A group of people clustered around a screen, smiling.

Indeed, much of it is difficult to disambiguate from generic marketing imagery.

Of course, I’ve taken hundreds of these kinds of photos as well, so perhaps it’s me that needs a more creative approach:

An archaeologist recording at Hili-16 archaeological site in the UAE. There are some archaeologists in the background and it's a sunny day.

So what’s next for archaeological photography? Are we retreating to our private groups and stashes, with only the bare (faceless) minimum published, uploaded to archives and shown at conferences? Does the preponderance of generative AI make the above photographs obsolete? Do we have enough photographs of people pointing at screens and holes, now that the imagined truth of photographs has been completely undermined?

Smile! click

Choose Your Own Digital Archaeology Paradata Adventure

The publications from my Other Eyes project on creating VR avatars based on bioarchaeological evidence are finally starting to come out, hurray!

This is perhaps the most unusual one, as it’s a choose-your-own adventure Twine game that allows you to re-do my research project, making either the same or different decisions than I did. At the beginning of the project I was trying to figure out how I would document all of the paradata–the decisions about the decisions I was making while creating Other Eyes–and I thought a choose your own adventure game might be fun.

Happily one of my very gifted Digital MSc students, McKenna Crowe, helped me take it on as a paid research assistant. She spent hours with me, as I carefully re-agonised over the choices I’d made and the choices I should have made differently! For the paths not taken, we had to come up with some plausible fictions on how it could have gone, effectively making a multiverse of Other Eyes. It would not have been possible without McKenna, she’s amazing.

Anyway, check out the publication, aided by the fantastic Judith Winters of Internet Archaeology, who is always up for something a bit different:

Morgan, C. and Crowe, M. 2025 Other Eyes: Choose Your Own Digital Archaeology Paradata Adventure, Internet Archaeology 69. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.69.10

Teaching All the (Archaeology) Things!

Between my sabbatical and teaching buy-out, I have been on a very light teaching load for the last couple of years. There are more grants in the works, but I’m back to an almost-full teaching load for the next two semesters, and there’s a lot of new lectures to plan. I’m trying to finish my book (and plan two exhibitions, and write another Big Grant and, and) but I’ve started outlining some of the reading lists and activities that I’d like to try out next year. So what is in store for me?

Autumn 2025:

Digital Creativity (postgraduate) – I taught this last year for the first time, using the Avebury Papers to teach about critical making and, my current love, worldbuilding in archaeology. I actually wrote a little bit about it on the Avebury Papers blog and completely forgot to cross-post it. I have been debating whether or not to keep using Avebury or to use another project I’m involved with, the Cults of the Head? project, led by Ian Armit, with a miracle postdoc Reb Ellis-Haken (seen above using one of our old scanners with a student) conducting the research and digitising. Between Reb and Fran Allfrey (and indirectly with Loes Opgenhaffen), I’ve been absolutely spoiled by working with incredible postdocs. Anyway, as I’m teaching a lot of new material in other classes, I might stick with Avebury again. It’s one of the primary modules in the MSc Digital Heritage degree, and heavily encouraged in the MSc Digital Archaeology degree, both of which I direct with Peter Schauer.

Interpreting Prehistory (undergraduate) I’m teaching 1/3 of this module, with Penny Spikins covering the Palaeolithic and James Taylor covering the Neolithic. I’ll be teaching Bronze Age in Arabia, which is exciting, as I’ve been digging there for the last couple of years, and may be back early next year. There’s some very specific ground I’d like to cover in this module, which will support another article I have in the works with Dan Eddisford, after we get our primary article out about the excavations at Hili Archaeological Park later this year.

Settlements and Society (undergraduate) I only have a single lecture in this one, again about my excavations in the UAE. I’ve taught it two years running now, and will change it up slightly.

Spring 2026:

Special Topic – Digital Archaeology (undergraduate) This is a very intensive module that I will be leading that will provide our undergraduates with an in-depth specialism in digital archaeology. It will be slightly odd for me, as I generally teach very practice-based, hands-on modules and special topics are supposed to be all lectures and discussion. Regardless it will be nice to update my reading lists since the 2022 Current Digital Archaeology article, which is totally out of date! There’s a chapter I’m writing right now on Digital Materiality & Archaeology that I think will be a good basis for a new lecture.

Archaeology and AI (postgraduate) I’m leading this brand new module, but will team-teaching with all our digital specialists–James Taylor, Guy Schofield and Peter Schauer. I am really excited as each of us has our own specialism and perspective on the topic and I think it will be a very robust offering, particularly as we’ve been involved with the new MAIA Cost action and I’ll be headed to Paris next week for the Automata meetings.

We’ll also begin to integrate some of the equipment we’ve been buying for the new Wolfson Digital Archaeology and Heritage Lab, which should officially launch in autumn 2026, but we’ll be looking for dissertations and use cases around our Artec Spider II, laser-aided ceramics profiler.

But for now, head back down into writing the book that’s been taking me years to get out!

My “Dijkstra Moment” ?

I worked in the computer science department at the University of Texas as an admin while the legendary Edsger Dijkstra was still there. I still think about him from time to time.

Though a computer scientist, he famously eschewed computers, because he felt that the physical thing limited his ability to dream of new capacities for computing. As an admin this was less to keep track of but a bit annoying–he actually loved faxes which even then were being phased out.

Now as a lecturer who thinks about digital things, I have leaned heavily into practice. Working with technology helps me think critically about that technology. As a PhD student I’d be annoyed at the “pure theorists” who had never made the thing they are critiquing.

I think that’s very much our “brand” at York: critical, applied, political, digital archaeology. I encourage students to follow our lead and experiment with things, see what works, what breaks, and the “ah-hah” moments that come when they understand the affordances of tech are great.

But I do wonder if I’ll face my “Dijkstra moment” when the tech is no longer inspiring, but limiting in what I think a better digital archaeology could be. Or, as is often the case, my experiments with digital just point at something we don’t understand about “analog” archaeology.

We’ll see. I still like nerd stuff so the day may never come.

*None of this btw is to lionise the old heads of computer science. I have equal amounts of fairly problematic stories about the scions of CS that sort of just washed over me in that 90s pre-me-too era.

Generative AI and Archaeological Visualisation

I wrote a brief article for The Conversation on the challenge that AI presents to archaeological visualisation. Check it out here:

https://theconversation.com/how-ai-imagery-could-be-used-to-develop-fake-archaeology-247838

Though I have done a lot of scicomm, it was the first time I’d written for The Conversation. At the outset, my goals for the article were:

  1. Point out that generative AI was being used increasingly to illustrate the past
  2. Note that many examples of generative AI seem to be based on faulty and misleading images that have been heavily critiqued by (primarily feminist) archaeologists
  3. Argue that illustration is actually an amazing tool to understand the past, and it’s a shame to delegate it
  4. Propose that there are creative ways to engage with generative AI in archaeology, and these may become more feasible and ethical through lower impact AI. As Haraway notes, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

I’m not sure that it properly covered all of these goals in the end, but it was an honest try. The article took a bit of a left turn in tackling the growing problems of representation in archaeology, race science and pseudoarchaeology. Additionally some of the original references fell away in the edit, and some sentences were added in that I didn’t properly check before it went to publication.

Working with popular media is always going to be a bit of a gamble and most of us could use more practice. Working with The Conversation was a considered move though, as it seemed like a subject that would be of broader interest than my little blog. So far, so good. Perhaps I’ll do better in the future.

Indeed I firmly believe I’ll be able to write a potentially completely different follow-up to the article in a year’s time, after we teach the first iteration of our new course, AI and Archaeology as part of our Digital Heritage and Digital Archaeology MScs. I’m also excited for the MAIA project to get going, so there will be a lot of energy in this particular subject.

Thank you to Kathryn Killackey for reading a draft of the article and suggesting changes, all mistakes are my own.

Hire Katy for cool illustrations based on science:

https://www.killackeyillustration.com/contact

The (boring) alternate realities of ChatGPT

Inspired by a shocking story of a list of fake references provided from a senior to a junior scholar, (details redacted obviously) I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to generate 10 references for me. Interestingly, one out of the ten is real (2), the others are not but potentially plausible. I guess, except for me co-authoring with Colin Renfrew:

  1. Morgan, C. (2012). Digging digital: Reflections on twenty-first century archaeology. In Clare Mills, Michael Pidd, and Esther Ward (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2012 Digital Humanities Congress (pp. 1-11). Sheffield, UK: HRI Online Publications.
  2. Morgan, C., & Eve, S. (2012). DIY and digital archaeology: What are you doing to participate? World Archaeology, 44(4), 521-537.
  3. Morgan, C., & Wright, H. (Eds.). (2018). Archaeology and digital communication: Towards strategies of public engagement. London, UK: Taylor & Francis.
  4. Morgan, C., & Eve, S. (Eds.). (2017). Digital archaeology and the archaeological network. London, UK: Taylor & Francis.
  5. Morgan, C., & Hacıgüzeller, P. (Eds.). (2020). Archaeological futures: Methods, data & practices. London, UK: UCL Press.
  6. Morgan, C., & Kamash, Z. (Eds.). (2020). Material cultures of remembrance: Exploring the archaeology of memory. London, UK: Routledge.
  7. Morgan, C., & Renfrew, C. (Eds.). (2019). Digital dawn: The dawn of digital archaeological practice in the Middle East and Mediterranean. London, UK: Oxbow Books.
  8. Morgan, C., & Ross, C. (2018). Digital media and archaeological objects: A challenge for interpretation. In Erin Walcek Averett, Jody Michael Gordon, and Derek B. Counts (Eds.), Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: The Potential of Digital Archaeology (pp. 97-118). Grand Forks, ND: The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.
  9. Morgan, C., & Smith, C. (2016). Emancipatory digital archaeology. Antiquity, 90(354), 713-718.
  10. Morgan, C., & Winters, J. (Eds.). (2019). Teaching Digital Archaeology: Methods and Practices. London, UK: UCL Press.

Most of the papers sound pretty banal, except for maybe the one authored with the incomparable Zena Kamash on memory and futures. Some of them represent things I probably should have done, like publish part of my thesis in Antiquity (9), though it looks like I’d have to co-author with Claire Smith to do so.

Perhaps I could have engineered a better prompt…but maybe I’ll just go and write instead.