Abstract:
This paper reviews and evaluates the potential use of modern visualization techniques in archaeology. It suggests the need to apply and develop such techniques as a central part of any modern archaeological investigation. The use of these methods is associated with wider questions about data representations, in particular, their integration with archaeological theory and their role in facilitating analysis and shaping interpretation. Concern for these questions and with the overall potential that information systems provide to capture, represent, analyze, and model archaeological information suggests the need for a new interdisciplinary focus, Archaeological Information Science. For such a focus to prosper, archaeologists need to develop additional skills that go beyond mere technical ones. They need to become more active in the design and creation of future information archaeological systems. To this end, archaeologists are urged to view this task as a way to extend archaeology in new directions and to recognize that the digital representation and treatment of archaeological information can generate new forms of doing archaeology.
This paper presents, basically, two major aims. On the one hand it discusses the potential role that different types of visualization can play in the archaeological discovery and discourse. On the other hand, it suggests the need of a new archaeological specialty concerned with the use archaeological information within the context of information systems.
ResponderEliminarThe author intentionally omits any reference to applications of virtual reality (VR) in archaeology, because of its limited role in the process of archaeological discovery, analysis or interpretation. Most of VR applications in archaeology capitalize their ability to render “realistic” scenes and to generate holistic experiences of the past. This mainly happens because the applications are aimed for public consumption. There are also some applications VR in GIS based tools, however although extremely powerful for rendering complex scenes, it was never intended as an analytical tool. This, however, does not mean that VR cannot be useful in archaeology.
It refers that there are two main surveys about visualization in archaeology. The first is due to Reilly and Rahtz (1992), while the second was published by Frisher and Dakouri-Hild (2008). Although separated by more than a decade, they are similar in their concern about implementation and technical issues. The concept of visualization is often restricted to purely “empirical” and/or realistic visualizations that emulate reality or that display data in traditionally abiding ways. There is seldom concern about the best strategies to display or visually explore archaeological information, or to present alternative ways to present data, its merits and limitations. Currently, visualization is just a matter of applying existing software. Basically the purpose of visualization in archaeology is largely reduced to a question of illustration and/or digital archiving.
The most familiar type of visualization in archaeology is the scientific visualization since it refers to various techniques used to represent, explore and interpret data derived from observations and models. The purpose is to gain insight into the data and the underlying processes that generate them. However, although the wide-ranging and well-established techniques that are currently in use in scientific visualization, very few have been adopted by archaeologists, mainly because:
- Archaeologists constantly alternate between different conceptualizations of space, while scientific visualization are mostly based on a field-based concept of space;
- The highly regular and exhaustive level of sampling needed for scientific visualization, especially volumetric, is rarely achieved in archaeology.
- For the most part, archaeologists concern themselves with collecting simple information that can adequately displayed using basic symbols and color.