Archaeology has historically been one of the leading fields in conveying the 'stuff' of the archaeological site and landscape in visual form. More than most disciplines, archaeologists have been at the forefront of developing and strategically deploying visual media. Visual media serve as 'stand-fors' the vestiges of the past. From GIS maps and query databases to stratigraphic profiles and artifact sketches to obsidian hydration composition graphs to photogrammetry, site and feature photographs and harris matrices, little of archaeology can be conveyed or argued without visual media. This is particularly so with a discipline that records as it irrevocably transforms through archaeological excavation and survey. Often all that remains at-hand are our visual media. Yet too often archaeologists restrict their usage and familiarization with media to graphic displays of statistics, GIS maps or 3-D 'fly-throughs'.

Digital media are changing the nature of scholarship. For a discipline that relies upon visual media, there are important considerations. Emergent media, likewise, afford new possibilities of capture, storage, retrieval, distribution and 'remixing' of the rich experiences of the archaeological. Many of us are archaeologists and we are aware that the Humanities at large is awakening to an archaeological sensibility. Part of this sensibility is to understand how media work for archaeology. More on this can be read under mission.