Archaeology 2.0
Immersive Archaeology. Photo (cc) John Lester
Second Life is one of those things I’m wary of, like Facebook. There’s plenty of people getting excited about them both, but it seems like a very insidous way of building into a gated community and a proprietary format. Electric Archaeology has persuaded me that Second Life could be worth a second look.
Shawn Graham has put up two posts. Archaeology in Second Life…. Where to begin? and Planning archaeology in Second Life (2). Eric Kansa has been throwing around some brilliant ideas as well at Digging Digitally looking at 2nd Life and Archaeological Databases. In my head till now Second Life has been next door to Doom, Quake and Half-Life, but not as compelling due to the lack of gore. The archaeological models I’ve seen have been painstakingly created, but they’ve always seemed unrealistic. Partly because of the limitations of technology, but also because they tend to be re-creations of monuments and artefacts in pristine condition. Between them Shawn and Eric have shown Second Life could be much more interesting if you take another approach and try and build a virtual excavation. This is Shawn’s plan, a limited excavation at first. You build strata and salt them with artefacts. The students then use virtual drawing frames to plan and plot what they find. You can then also practice drawing Harris matrices and other techniques to produce a report. There’s still limitations. I’m colour-blind so I tend to find the feel of the soil is as important and subtle variations in texture, but I think that’s a trivial complaint. Shawn isn’t saying that this will replace excavation training any more than seeing photos of an excavation would. With the information in 3D I think it’s possible that some concepts in stratigraphy make start making more sense.
Eric takes this further and comments on the use of XML files from excavations. XML is a mark-up language. Information about something <info>goes between tags</info>. The files themselves are plain text which makes them future-proof as far as I can tell. The problem Eric foresees is that at the moment these files only carry so much information. The find spots of artefacts are rarely plotted in three dimensions. However, when they are this will allow for a much richer publication of an excavation.
The ability to integrate the two systems could be revolutionary when you look at the kind of information which is recorded. Eric Kansa offers this example of a sheep radius. That’s a bone in a sheep, not the circumference of a sheep, which was my first thought. With these in a virtual dig you could, with a couple of clicks, compare where the sheep bones were found in comparison to the fish bones or horse bones. You could click to see where large bones or small bones are scattered. Or search for specific types of butchery marks on a bone. The Archaeozoologist could probably add plenty more options. This could be done for any properties of any artefact. GIS experts might, with a sigh, point out this is the type of thing they’ve been excited about for years, but wrapped up in Second Life it could be the way to sell it to the more technophobic archaeologists.
Really it’s the fact it’s in Second Life which is my concern. Is it possible to export the information out from Second Life and make it accessible to other programs? If not then you would seem to be at the mercy of one company. Which is why I should go back and see what you can and cannot do in Second Life. If you’re interested in what teaching later in the 21st century might look like, then it would be an excellent idea to subscribe to Electric Archaeology‘s RSS feed, and Digging Digitally‘s too obviously.
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