The status of the use of computer applications in Danish archaeology

Although considerations and experiments on the ase of computers have a relatively long tradition in Danish archaeology, no comprehensive scientific project has yet been carried through. The use of computers in archaeological science is reduced to storing and retrieval purposes (besides text-processing) and, until now, leaving the analytical potentials as almost unexploited. The level of Danish theoretical archaeology is the main reason for this situation. Generations of archaeologists educated before about 1970 were dominated by the cultural-history tradition, and their humanistic approach was by definition in contradiction to a 'hard science' like mathematics. So, computers were thought to be 'incompatible' with the archaeological theory of that time. Between World War II and about 1970 the introduction of precise definitions and measurements in archaeology, due to a strong positivistic influence, was supposed to change archaeology to a 'scientific' state, 'scientific' here meaning 'value-neutral/objective.' For the generation of archaeologists who were influenced by this approach, computers were a natural choice, but they were at that time 'user-unfriendly' and the archaeologists had no educational background for using them. Despite these new methods, the goal of archaeology seemed to be still the same, as well as the tendency towards empiricism, and, in consequence of that, theory-hostiUty. This picture changed at the universities about 1970, where Danish archaeology became influenced by the processual 'new archaeology' and by neo-marxistic approaches. Where the last approach tended to be strongly anti-empiristic it kept close ties to the old humanistic tradition, and in these qualitative analysis there was no use for computers. 'New archaeology' never got a real foothold at Danish universities. As far as I can understand from the development abroad, the use of computers in 'New archaeology' seems restricted to simulation-applications; computer archaeology, as far as it exists in Danish research, for those reasons seems to be stuck in a kind of 'stalemate' situation. What must be the force behind a future computer archaeology is a dynamic integration