photogrammetry, and to the digital infrastructures providing data search, retrieval, and archiving facilities.With automation, archaeological tasks are delegated to mechanical, or software, or software-driven machines. This diverges from Susskind and Susskind's fourth stage, 'externalization ' (2015:202), in which the practical expertise of professionals is made available online to non-specialists, a feature which is already present in the systematization of archaeology and is arguably a characteristic of the subject more generally. Different kinds of automation can be highlighted which overlap in different ways.