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CAA has been meeting annually for almost forty years, so one might expect that we would have a reasonable idea of the nature and role of archaeological computing. Yet some apparently see this as an emerging field (e.g. Bimber & Chang 2011), others suggest the need for a new archaeological speciality: Archaeological Information Science (Llobera 2011). Even the Wikipedia page on computational archaeology describes archaeoinformatics as an emerging discipline. Is this a sign of a lack of confidence in developments over the past forty years, or is it the reverse - an indication of self-assurance and a sense of moving boldly forward through a more formal definition of the subject? Is it connected with the growing appearance of cyber-archaeology in digital research outside of archaeology itself (e.g. Zimbra et al 2010)?  What are the implications for archaeological computing? This paper will seek to address these and related questions.

archaeoinformatics; archaeological information science; computational archaeology; cyberarchaeology