This post on 'What comes after post-processualism' caught my eye, I guess because I have a fascination with the ways in which archaeological theory affects database design and digitisation strategies. I either work with contract archaeologists or on a post-processual site and the structural requirements are quite different, though both fundamentally rely on single context recording.

We have to face the fact that archaeological theory is quite simply no longer at the heart of archaeology, as it perhaps was from the 1960s until the end of the 1980s.

Instead we have seen over the last few decades an enormous expansion of commercial archaeology, now controlling far more funding than the Universities and responsible for the lion share of archaeological research. We may or may not like that fact and what it led to in terms of research results but commercial archaeology is undeniably today a far bigger player in the discipline than its poor sibling, University-based research.