Den som dokumenterar en grop åt andra

Sammanfattning: An archaeological excavation made within contract archaeology almost invariably means that the site is destroyed. This means that the documentation, which can be seen as the site’s remaining archive, is extremely important. In this master’s thesis the written digital documentation from eight excavations made within Swedish contract archaeology between 2000 and 2013 is examined using the technique of close reading. There are three basic questions: what is actually written; is the data FAIR, and, if not, what is problematic? It is shown that, while the data is or is about to become FAIR in a technical sense, inconsistencies within and between the projects’ metadata when it comes to structure and wording limits their interoperability and reusability. It is argued that the differences depend on the archaeologists’ habitus. New standards and practices are needed if archaeology is to make the best possible use of the digital means of searching and combining data. To achieve this, archaeologists need to discuss and bring their different habitus in line with each other.