How Big Is Big Data?

The advent of Big Data is a recent and debated issue in Digital Archaeology. The term 'Big Data' was introduced about 15 years ago, as a consequence of the impact of the Internet's expansion, which in turn inaugurated the era of Information Age. The shift in scale of data volume in archaeology and the need for new analytical methods and techniques are not a new phenomenon in the history of archaeological computing, which is scattered with periods of information growth coinciding with the introduction of both data dissemination strategies and new technologies. Several main periods can be identified, which correspond to a ten-year evolutionary logic. Theoretical, methodological and technical advances are illustrated through the words of the protagonists, the pages of the Journal «Archeologia e Calcolatori», now celebrating its 30th year of publication, and the information gathered in the Virtual museum of archaeological computing. Today, the role of Big Data methodologies in archaeology should be primarily that of i) combining and processing existing massive cultural datasets, ii) fostering the centralised aggregation of institutional datasets into commonly accessible resources, and iii) providing archaeological syntheses and new research strategies.