Across the Rubicon

The Corporate World Needs More… Archaeologists?

Data Story-Telling Across the Ages

It’s probably hard to imagine two worlds more different than those of business and archaeology. The business world is one of executives, industry, technology, and finance – full of fast-paced meetings and tailored suits. Archaeology, by contrast, is a world of academics concerned with antiquities and esoterica. Our office attire typically consists of jeans and boots adorned by mud, bug-spray, and (very often) bandages. We spend much of our time in libraries or labs when we’re not off in the middle of nowhere digging very precise holes to find little bits of stuff.

Popular fiction describes archaeologists looking for lost civilizations, cities of gold, or vast treasures – and this amuses us greatly. In reality we are looking for the minutia of daily life of regular people, and rarely the kings and queens (although this is what makes the news). What might otherwise be known as trash dumps (we call them “middens”) gives us a window into what people had, used, ate, and discarded.

The whole discipline of archaeology, and the reason for all of our methods, is geared towards finding ways to collect as many forms of data possible to understand and fully describe events in the past. All of human behavior leaves something behind, and the questions are how can we find it and how much of it can we collect?

Curiously, the reason why we do these admittedly strange things is exactly why the corporate world really needs more archaeologists…

We tell very detailed stories about the past, using large amounts of meticulously curated data.

Sound familiar?

The Data of Archaeology

As fascinating as pyramids, temples, and royal riches may be, archaeologists discovered a long time ago that the big things provide limited information. Palaces and riches only tell about the elite and the powerful or grand events, but not what the vast majority of life was like. The majority of archaeologists spend their time looking at or for the overlooked – what historical archaeologist James Deetz famously wrote about with “In Small Things Forgotten” describing the everyday artifacts of American colonial life.

It turned out that the data that really told the stories about the past were in all of those little details. To really know how history was being shaped and how those grand cities came to be, we had to find the underlying patterns in the ephemera of the details.

We also learned over time that looking at artifacts alone wasn’t enough either. They were only a part of the data, but not the whole story. Looking only at artifacts is like reading the words in a novel after they’ve been shuffled – it may all be there, but still makes no sense. You need structure and context. We needed to understand the processes behind how those artifacts were created and used, and learn how different behaviors and effects of time influenced the distribution of those objects across the landscape.

We started studying the natural and cultural processes that gave rise to the patterns of artifacts as data. Archaeologists started seeking out expertise in everything from geology to climate to civil engineering to better understand what processes were transforming the artifact data and the technologies involved in their production and use.

You’ll find archaeologists specializing in flint knapping, glacial geo-physics, agricultural or industrial technologies, soil or food chemistry… all to tell more detailed stories about how people did the things they did. There are even more specialized computational archaeologists, archaeo-chemists, archaeo-botanists, and geo-archaeologists that have done advanced studies in multiple academic disciplines (and occasionally multiple degrees, such as ourselves) to be sure we can apply the most advanced tools and methods to tell even more detailed stories.

As archaeologists’ stories about the past got ever more detailed and sophisticated, though, it also became apparent that there was still a missing element. Understanding what data is there in the artifacts and how different processes affect the archaeological record gives us a very detailed picture of the past. That’s all well and good, but it still doesn’t answer the most important question and the reason we really do all of this grunt work – what does it mean?

The most important question to archaeologists is to answer why the past occurred as it did, and (for some of us anyway) how that all brought about the way that people are now. That grand and overarching why is the same as it is in all of science and philosophy, and of course is the most difficult question of all. To even attempt to answer why, though, scientists come up explanatory theories and hypotheses with which to test them. Scientists always have to have these sorts of theories. The theories about why guide our understanding of the what and how questions, which all of the data and methods are meant to support.

An Archaeology of Data

The point of this article isn’t to teach people about archaeology, though. Our point is that archaeologists are highly specialized data story-tellers, and to share the lessons we’ve learned in the field over more than a century of creating detailed stories about events and people we cannot directly observe. We have had to find ways to extract as much insight as possible from limited and very unstructured data.

To do so we’ve had to confront the complexities involved in data selection, collection, and feature construction. Archaeologists have spent a lot of time thinking about how to transform data into knowledge without the luxury of having much of any control over data availability or quality. As more and more organizations try to find ways to extract insights and value from data, they are running headlong into the same sorts of questions.

What archaeologists found was that trying to answer questions and gain meaningful insights had to carefully balance all three types of questions – the what, how, and why – rather than trying to focus on any one of them. An organization that is trying to be data-centric in its assessment and decision-making needs to do the same. It needs to carefully consider the intersections of data, method, and theory as being merely facets of the same insight. Whether or not you actually hire archaeologists to be your data story-tellers, you do need to find people that take the same holistic view of the stories in the data.

After all, archaeologists are out there telling detailed and data-driven stories about events that were hundreds or thousands of years in the past just from a few bits of ancient debris.

Odds are pretty good that our approach could probably find some patterns and insights in your data as well, don’t you think?