 Hello. Welcome to our session, Human, Post-Human, Transhuman, Digital Archaeologies. And so I was just going to give you a brief introduction to this session, which should be exciting, at least in my opinion, and do a little bit of housekeeping, and we'll talk a little bit about transhumanism and post-humanism, because I'm not necessarily all that familiar to most everyone, including myself until recently. But I wanted just to stand up, and I'm Colleen. This is Marta, and this is Kate, and we will be moderating. Facilitating. Facilitating. Thank you very much. Discussion today, and I'll talk a little bit about that again in a second. Right, and so we have a hashtag S363, if you want. It's very catchy. Exactly, exactly. I think I actually even got it wrong first. Yeah. Great. So, first of all, who wants to define transhumanism for us? No. This is a discussion led. All of you are expected to work too, even if you're not presenting. Oh, no. Great. Okay, I'll have a go. Yeah. So, transhumanism is a recently philosophical, I think, or current that wants to see the human as a transformed being in the sense that in the future, in the near future, already can become a cyborg in the sense that we will be better humans, partly AIs. We can perhaps live longer, and through that, we won't be real humans anymore. The problem, and why it is different from post-humanism, is that it is a very anthropocentric theory. Because it's, of course, very much aimed at the human, but a better human. So, transhumanism is really an effort to transform ourselves to a different and improved species, but still a species that is on top of other ones. That's how I can define it. And with all these definitions, absolutely. We're going to be talking about them throughout the session, and so this is definitely kind of a beginning understanding of the terms which we will be developing throughout each of the papers. Thank you very much. I know, that was a terrible way to end up. Thank you. I'm pretty comprehensive, actually. Yeah, no, it was very good. And I find instances of transhumanism particularly interesting in digital archaeology in that we think of a bolt-on, right? Somebody's wearing a GoPro while they're digging, or they're trying to use GIS to understand the archaeological site in a different way. And so it's seen very much in digital archaeology as a way to improve the human's understanding of the past. That's kind of how I see it. There are other more sinister themes to it, in that transhumanism is an idea that we can kind of like take our brains out of our heads and then put it online, and we don't really need our bodies or anything else anymore, and we can be immortal. To be honest, we're in the ground. I don't know. I think that's cool. That's the problem with all these things. They're really, really interesting, compelling ideas, but we don't really engage with them, even though we are performing some of the technological affordances that could be described as transhuman or posthuman. Right, so, posthuman. Who would like to define posthuman? New person. Posthumism is a sub-discipline of humanism whereby we're sort of personally flexing on what it means to be human. Within that, Wikipedia has got seven different sub-sections. One of them is transhumanism, too, there, but it could be reflected on what it is to be human and to see if there are other approaches to humanity that can... Ultimately, they all seem to lead back onto transhumanism in a way that they can see to be so sub-flexible. It looks more like our impacts on the world and so it makes it more on-out, but it just impacts all of the academic species. Absolutely. It's also a very, very big subject that we won't necessarily be able to get into all critiques. And even within all of these papers, there are several different takes on posthumanism, which I think we hope we can pick up on and see how applicable or not applicable they are within archaeology and digital archaeology. You know, I don't actually want to go into this at the moment. But, you know, with all of these things, speaking as humans, transhumans, posthumans, let's keep it at the heart of the discussion and remember that we can do these digital archaeologies and technologies and understand the past, but they are embodied because everything we do is embodied. And so keeping the human at the heart of it, I think, is an important part of the session as we're organizing. Right. And so some fairly simple housekeeping. We asked all of our presenters today to try to present their ideas in five minutes with five slides. Maximum. Yes. You can do that. And that was really mean because, again, we have really big ideas that are here. And the thing is that we're going to be kind of flexible on that. We're going to allow people to speak longer if they need to. It's just we will keep to time, though, 15 minutes for each paper. So if you need to go to another paper or whatever, we just want to be able to respect each other as authors and respect our audience as well. If you manage to hit 12 minutes, I will stand up right there. I'm wearing my loudest clothing. So I'll be incredibly visible. That will be your message to please wrap it up. I hope none of you will. I don't think anyone will, because we are, again, trying to turn this into as much discussion as possible. Yeah. So papers have been pre-circulated. Yeah. All the papers are pre-circulated. They're all online. And you can get to them through going to Middle Savagery or just Google middlesavagery.wordpress.com if you'd like to follow along. And other notes on five by five. So that's it. Yeah. And so there will be discussion sections afterwards as well. And so that brings us to the discussion. I probably should have said this before we started the discussion. But we'll be running it along with the progressive stack. And so the progressive stack means that people of color and women and junior scholars will be allowed to speak first. And this is a method that was developed during Occupy in the States, which tried to forefront voices that aren't always heard in discussions. And it's been translated into pedagogical context with really great success, saying that by allowing the voices that are often marginalized in discussions to start, you get really interesting knock-on effects wherein these people are able to speak more, speak louder. It really recenters the conversation in really interesting ways. But the big problem with it is that it will be led by me, which is problematic enough, and then Marta, who is going to be much better at it. But it is limited to our visual knowledge of what you look like, which doesn't necessarily afford things like disabilities and whatnot. So really, if you have something that you would like to discuss and is not necessarily visible to us, please both forgive us for apparently being jerks by not calling on you first and understanding your marginalized status, but also let us know if you can. And that can be during a discussion break, a coffee break, as you like. So again, it is not a perfect way of discussion and that actually pedicates it on people wanting to discuss things at all. Yeah. So we'll see. All right. This is all feeding into a publication. I thought I would actually say this. So we are sponsoring as the journal. So I'm one of the editors of the European Journal of Archaeology. And the session is sponsored by the journal. Last year, the editorial board decided that digital archaeology was something that they wanted to see Laura. And so I'm not being a digital archaeologist terribly myself. I went out and recruited to. And we are running this session with the goal of publishing proceedings in the journal in about 12 months time. Anything else you wanted to add there? Yeah. So with that said, it's really, really helpful to us then to poke holes in our ideas, see where we have our blind spots. You know, don't be mean because let's just not be mean, but have discussions. And so this will all really help out these publications, be more robust and be more representative of the field. I appreciate that. All right. And so the session is being filmed. I think I put a question mark at the end of that because I wasn't sure. But it is being filmed and it will be audience questions will also be recorded by sound. If you would like to not be recorded, then you can write a question down and I will give it to me and I will say it out loud. That's fine. I completely understand and respect. You wanted to be digitally invisible. I sometimes wish I was.