Digital Archaeology: From Interdisciplinarity to the ‘Fusion’ of Core Competences Towards the Consolidation of New Research Areas

The aim of this article is to explore the interdisciplinary turn observed in the development of humanities computing, in terms of integration and fusion of expertise. The debate started with the Seminar on Discipline umanistiche e informatica. Il problema dell’integrazione, held in 1991 at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Moving backwards in time, already from the 1960s the role of ‘integration’ was at the heart of many interdisciplinary initiatives supported by the National Research Council of Italy and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei as part of their coordinated efforts to promote scientific progress. Through a number of archaeological case studies pivoting around the Etruscan civilisation, it will be shown how over time archaeological computing, and its evolution towards digital archaeology, has found in GIS and multimedia systems a unitary platform on which methods and practice of data acquisition, analysis, interpretation, and communication can converge. The concept of ‘fusion’, however, is much more recent and responds to a global resource management model, which combines the methods of archaeology with the objectives of Heritage Science, along the research path that goes from field and laboratory investigation to the protection, enhancement and communication of cultural heritage.

Virtual Heritage: A Concise Guide

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments.

Getting It Right and Getting It Wrong in Digital Archaeological Ethics

Though the ethics of archaeological practice have changed over the life of the discipline (and have arguably become more robust), full consideration has not yet been given to how digital methodologies and the emergence of digital technologies have created new areas requiring ethical introspection. The pace of adoption of digitally centred archaeological data and digitally facilitated archaeological practice has not been met by the adoption of discipline-wide standards related to archaeological ethics. The result of this mismatch in ethics and practice is the creation of archaeologists who utilize digital forms, but whose archaeology is ungrounded in frameworks that specifically consider the ethical burdens of digital tools, methodology, and theory. This chapter details views of digital archaeological ethics related to digital archaeology as tools, digital archaeology as methodology, and digital archaeological pedagogy.

Art, Creativity and Automation. From Charters to Shared 3D Visualization Practices

In this study, we introduce the themes of the Special Issue on Art, Creativity and Automation. Sharing 3D Visualization Practices in Archaeology, and present the most important outcomes of a roundtable session involving prominent researchers in the field, organized by the authors during the Archon Winter School in February 2020. By assessing the diversity of research aims, artistic projects, creative practices and technology used in the contributions to the Special Issue, and drawing on the thoughts and perspectives generated during the roundtable discussion, we seek to identify shared challenges within the community of visualizers which could ultimately pave the way to shared practices. In this light, we assess whether established charters and guidelines are still relevant in a now matured digital archaeology, where visualization techniques have attained a central position in archaeological knowledge production. Although parts of the guidelines have become common practice, the remainder did not keep up with the fast pace of development of digital practice and its current fundamental role in archaeology, and as a result some of the guidelines risk becoming obstructive in archaeological creative practice.

Visualizing Archaeologists: A Reflexive History of Visualization Practice in Archaeology

Visualization techniques may have changed over the years, but have they fundamentally changed archaeological visual literacy and the ways archaeologists create knowledge? Or do new digital tools merely disguise conventional practices? The answer may reside in a deeper understanding of the long tradition of visualization practice, from the Renaissance to the present, for which the foundation lies in the activities of antiquarians and artists, as well as artistic, technical, and scientific innovations. This paper presents an historical synopsis of two usually separated but complementary research areas, digital archaeology and archaeological visualization, and builds on previous research undertaken on these traditionally separated subjects. By taking a slightly Dutch perspective I will introduce a few visualizing protagonists who have left substantial traces in our collective visual memory, aiming to contribute to a more inclusive historical narrative on archaeological visualization. The overview ends with an integrated discussion on the shared creative visual practice and its epistemic role in archaeological knowledge production. A praxis-oriented and reflexive approach to the history of visualization provides a critical understanding of the current workings of 3D visualization as a creative practice, and how archaeology responds and acts upon innovations and the adoption of new visualization technology.

From Digital Archaeology to Data-Centric Archaeological Research

Since the end of the 20th century the widespread use of digital applications in archaeology has legitimized their inclusion in the archaeological toolbox. Together with archaeological sciences, databases, GIS and other computer-based methods are nowadays present in every respectable archaeological investigation. This makes archaeology a peculiar discipline, where the scientific method combines with the historical one to produce new knowledge. However, the large availability of archaeological data creates the risk of a data deluge and may suggest using online information just to collect previous interpretations rather than to re-use the data supporting them. A ‘Grand Challenges’ list compiled some years ago includes important research questions that undergird contemporary issues and require an appropriate digital methodology to be addressed. The present paper discusses the benefits, or better the absolute need, of a data-centric methodology to address large-scale research. It argues that an acritical use of the so-called ‘Big Data’ approach may be questionable. It suggests how the combination of artificial intelligence with human intelligence is the key to progress into the understanding of phenomena of paramount societal importance for researchers and for the public at large.