Creating a digital future for the past through unanticipated directions Geert Verhoeven 1 The epistemological foundation of archaeology is based mainly on the connections between imperfectly preserved material culture and humans. Archaeology is thus a lot about materiality, which is reflected in its many documentation practices. Whether one is examining individual artefacts, excavating an anthropogenic stratification or spotting geo-archaeological marks from an aeroplane, the eye records and analyses (in an analogue way) the general morphology, pertinent spatial features, texture and colour. The past two decades have born witness to the rapid uptake of various digital ways of “looking at” archaeology; digital approaches to document, manage, analyse and disseminate archaeology have witnessed a severe boom. Anno 2018, almost every archaeologist can be considered a digital archaeologist since digital archaeology merely is about integrating digital workflows into every aspect of archaeological methodology (Morgan and Eve, 2012). 2 Despite the transformative practices computers have brought into archaeological research over the past decades, the use of computers in archaeology was never at the forefront of the digital innovation. Almost two decades ago, it was already brought under the attention that archaeology (or cultural heritage studies at large) were always more of a follower than an innovator, borrowing tools and practices from other disciplines (Scollar, 1999; Lull, 1999). For some, this observation might be unsurprising given archaeology’s traditionally humanistic nature. It is, however, noteworthy that in a more recent past, scholars have come to remarkably similar conclusions, questioning the novelty of many of the newly introduced digital approaches and the minimal impact they had on both the practical and more theoretical aspects of archaeology (Llobera, 2011). This partly relates to the chameleon-like nature of archaeology. Archaeology is by its very nature extremely prone to amalgamate research across disciplinary boundaries, borrowing from anthropology, art history, computer science, biology, geography, geomatics, history, philosophy and sociology to name but a few. Archaeologists continuously oscillate between subject groups to integrate different kinds of relevant information. Being ultra-cross- and trans-disciplinary means that 10 Geert Verhoeven <gverhoev@gmail.com>