Escaping Stereotypes
When people think of archaeology, they often picture exotic excavations in distant lands, uncovering ancient civilizations – Egyptian Mummies, Classical Rome, Greek Statues. But modern archaeology is far more structured and important to our daily lives than most people realize. Archaeology exists anywhere humans have existed, and it can take many forms depending on the location and the period. We often only think of those areas like Rome where archaeology is everywhere, it visibly juts out from the landscape in marble ruins. However, the reality of archaeology is that it is almost always under our feet no matter where in the world we are.
A common myth is that archaeology doesn’t exist in places like North America because physical artifacts and ruins aren’t as common as they are in other parts of the world. That couldn’t be further from the truth – across North American our history extends over 13,000 years. We commonly find archaeology from groups like the Adena or Hopewell Cultures that existed over 1000 years ago and left massive burials grounds and other artifacts for us to find.
Archaeology isn’t just about the ancient either. Many archaeologists work on historical sites, still recovering artifacts and learning more about things like the Revolutionary War, the Oregon Trail, and even more recent periods like the Gold Rush where we can find entire ships – like the Niantic – under places like the San Fransico Financial District.
These things are found, not as part of exotic academic digs, but as part of Commercial Archaeology or Cultural Resource Management (CRM).
What is Commercial Archaeology & CRM?
Commercial archaeology refers to archaeology conducted by professional firms for development projects. Whether constructing roads, railways, housing developments, or energy infrastructure, companies must comply with heritage laws that protect archaeological sites. In the US, this falls under Cultural Resource Management (CRM), a sector responsible for ensuring compliance with laws like the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966. In the UK, commercial archaeology follows PPG16 principles, now embedded in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).
Both frameworks require archaeological assessments before construction, leading to excavation, recording, and preservation efforts. Today, over 90% of all archaeology is conducted commercially, not by universities or museums.
Archaeology is a billion-dollar industry. The global market for archaeology—including commercial excavations, heritage consultancy, and research—is estimated at $12 billion annually. In the UK, commercial archaeology is valued at approximately £300-400 million per year, while in the US, the CRM sector generates over $1.5 billion annually.
Far from being an obscure academic pursuit, archaeology directly supports infrastructure and economic development, ensuring that cultural heritage is preserved amid modern expansion and growth.
Current Trends in Archaeology
Commercial archaeology is a relatively young field, having only emerged as a formal industry in the mid-to-late 20th century with the introduction of heritage protection laws. Unlike academic archaeology, which has centuries of institutional backing, commercial archaeology developed out of the need to balance rapid expansion with cultural heritage preservation. As a result, the sector is still in the process of professionalizing, refining its standards, and improving best practices.
The field faces ongoing challenges, including standardization of reporting, pay equity for archaeologists, and developing digital workflows. Archaeology has traditionally been seen as the enemy of construction and development – a tedious process full of unknowns that could hold up projects for months, years, and even decades. However, archaeology isn’t the enemy of development, and, over the last decade, archaeologists have been trying to work more closely to ensure that projects are finished as quickly as possible and without delays.
But… there is only so much archaeologists can do always working against the clock. Excavations need to be fast, material needs to be catalogued, analyzed, and stored while constantly moving on to new projects. As a result, much of the field is still relying on the same tools and technologies we’ve been using for the last 40-50 years. Companies across the world are still using pen and paper to record information, hand drawing artifacts, and manually inputting data into spreadsheets or custom-built databases which consumes time and money that could be better spent on other projects or research and development.
That is where ArchNova comes onto the scene. We don’t want to just modernize archaeology; we want to propel it into the future. We are building our AI applications to help archaeologists work faster, work smarter, and work on the things that we want to work on. So much of our work is writing tedious reports, manually entering data, measuring, sifting, and doing work that most of us don’t want to do. More importantly, we often don’t have enough time to actually examine all of the material we excavate – some studies suggest that we only ever analyze 85-90% of what is excavated.
Our workflow will help archaeologists work faster, which means construction and development will be completed faster and, most importantly, our platform will provide access to that archaeology to the public through Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).
Follow along on our journey and our article/podcast series where we’ll be exploring what archaeology is, how it works, and talking to archaeologists to get a better understanding of what it is that we do and how AI can improve their work.
