Aycock's (Reference Aycock2021) interdisciplinary intervention into digital archaeology is very welcome. My own investigations of digital ‘things’ affirm their importance, and my collaborations with computer scientists have provided considerable insights into the affordances of digital media and their impact on knowledge creation in archaeology. Aycock's identification of the importance of archaeological investigations of digital things is reflected in my early research, which interrogated a digital photograph, video and 3D reconstruction through object biographies structured by a feminist, emancipatory framework (Morgan Reference Morgan2012). The investigation of digital things has been central in my subsequent research on the impact of digital technology on archaeological knowledge production (and the attending analogue echoes), investigating how digital technology can reveal interstitial spaces for new experiences of and connections to the past, and on how archaeologists can interpret digital things. In my response, I focus on how archaeologists can better understand digital things and the social and political implications of an archaeology of digital things.

Archaeologists do need help to create, trace, understand, curate and archive digital things. We have always been consummate bricoleurs of theory and method, with diverse interdisciplinary collaborators. My understanding of digital things is no exception; here I integrate ideas suggested by Gilles Deleuze (Reference Deleuze2001) into a discussion of the sandbox video game Minecraft. Deleuze's work has been rapidly taken up by archaeologists (for a summary, see Harris Reference Harris2021), and I argue that many of his concepts are particularly relevant for an archaeology of digital things. Aycock (Reference Aycock2021) is correct in noting the utility of archaeogaming for animating these discussions, and the example discussed here draws on this energy and resonance. Finally, I follow Russell (Reference Russell2020) in using the term ‘AFK’ (away from keyboard) in lieu of ‘analogue’, ‘real world’ or IRL (in the real world) to note non-digital things or experiences, as it highlights the slippage in a dualistic construction of digital/non-digital, de-centring the perception of AFK as ‘real’ and emphasising the realness of digital experiences.

Minecraft is a popular game for archaeological reconstructions and outreach, as players may mine resources, breed and kill animals, cultivate crops and construct or destroy buildings, landscapes and things. For recent outreach events (YorNight in 2014 and 2015), I reconstructed in Minecraft the Vale of Pickering landscape to enable children to create the Mesolithic site of Star Carr (Morgan (Reference Morgan2015), as inspired by the excavations described in Milner et al. (Reference Milner, Taylor and Conneller2018)). Relevant to this discussion, I set up a ‘match the tools’ table, wherein children would identify various AFK tools by their Minecraft representations (Figure 1). A bucket, shovel, pickaxe (and a stand-in mattock), compass and a nodule of flint were set out next to their Minecraft in-game equivalents. Many of these tools were relatively easy to translate between AFK and digital—arguably these were a Deleuzian ‘copy’ linked to the original artefact by resemblance and in-game function. The AFK flint nodule disrupted this easy connection, and the children were surprised when its in-world identity was revealed. While this was only a casual observation and not structured research, I argue that the nodule of flint could be described as a simulacrum—a copy that has lost resemblance to the original “so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze2001: 69). Minecraft players mined and used flint to create in-game arrows and ‘flint and steel’, a tool to create fires. Yet they were astonished to find that the AFK version was “just a rock”.

Figure 1.

Matching AFK tools to their Minecraft representations (photograph by C. Morgan).

As archaeologists, we characterise things both in terms of their similarities and their differences. Deleuze (Reference Deleuze2001: 220) further encourages us to forefront these differences and note the spaces created and altered by these differences wherein singularities are condensed and there is an acceleration or deceleration of time. The Minecraft buckets, shovels and pickaxes could be conceived as representations of their AFK equivalents, repeating their appearances in game. Yet these repetitions have deviated significantly from their AFK tethers. The Minecraft flint is also a repetition, but is markedly distinct from the AFK flint—a thing, in itself, unmoored by representation. But would knowing about AFK flint really tell us more about the digital flint? How can we understand Minecraft flint as archaeologists?

Aycock (Reference Aycock2021) advises us to partner with computer scientists to examine the code. This is, of course, advisable for us to understand how the Minecraft flint was created, how it changed over time and is linked to other in-game affordances. We could document and potentially ‘excavate’ the Java code for the game, as Aycock and other archaeologists have done. The code, however, is one part of the assemblage that the Minecraft flint comprises, and I am equally interested in the other constituent parts. A prefigurative, embodied, feminist post-human approach—also known as cyborg archaeology (Morgan (Reference Morgan2019); by way of Haraway (Reference Haraway1985) and Braidotti (Reference Braidotti, Medina, Medina and Stanbury1997))—would encourage us to investigate the political implications of Minecraft, as its play is based in an extractionist settler colonial understanding of the world (Brazelton Reference Brazelton2020), accompanied by a call to reconfigure the game along kin-based networks. An embodied approach would explore the effects of the digital on our bodies: on posture, bone spurs, and microplastics in our organs. A climate-aware archaeological investigation of scale and environment could help us understand how digital mining of a different kind, for example, bitcoin, is hastening global warming (Mora et al. Reference Mora2018).

Aycock (Reference Aycock2021: 1584) advises archaeologists that “there is a storm coming”. I acknowledge that there is unchecked growth in the creative application of technology, and that this yields exciting connections and things that need investigation in their own fullness; digital things are not a pale imitation of AFK things and experiences. Although there has been and will be tremendous data loss, archaeologists have great skill at sifting through the remains. That these losses will probably reflect AFK structural inequities is also notable. What will be investigated and archived? What will be preserved and what will be lost? What will be the digital monumental state statuary and what will be the ephemeral wooden toys, the colourful cloth and the emotive gestures? Furthermore, I caution that a full preservation and documentation effort would increase our own participation in the mass extinction event currently occurring under ‘Empire’, what Bergman and Montgomery term as the “organised destruction under which we live” (Reference Bergman and Montgomery2017: 25; see also Morgan Reference Morgan2021).

Instead, let us reimagine an archaeology of digital things through anti-fascism, decolonisation, craft, degrowth and prefiguration. This should draw from Flexner's vision of archaeology in the ruins of capitalism, with archaeologists

Can we record, arrange and transmit our understanding of these digital things in a way that foments connection, a “circle of relationships” with humans and “non-human kin—from network daemons to robot dogs to artificial intelligences” (Lewis et al. Reference Lewis, Arista, Pechawis and Kite2018: 2)? It is our task, and that of our interlocutors. As such, I welcome interdisciplinary interventions, as long as they stand with me as an accomplice.