Cyber-archaeology: Reconstruction & Communication of the Ancient World

February 13, 2008: 12:00pm - 12:00pm
Location: 290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building, the Maria & Dado Banatao Conference Room, UC Berkeley

Maurizio Forte [Professor, Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities, UC Merced]

Part of the CITRIS Research Exchange at UC Berkeley. The complete schedule for the fall semester is online at RE-Spring2008. Questions during the talk can be sent via Yahoo IM to username: citrisevents. Sponsored by Infineon Technologies.

Abstract:

The ontology of archaeological information, or the cybernetics of archaeology, refers to all the interconnective relationships which the datum produces, the code of transmission, and its transmittability. Because it depends on interrelationships, by its very nature information cannot be neutral with respect to how it is processed and perceived. It follows that the process of knowledge and communication have to be unified and represented by a single vector.

3D information is regarded as the core of the knowledge process, because it creates feedback, then cybernetic difference, among the interactor, the scientist and the ecosystem. It is argued that Virtual Reality (both offline and online) represents a possible ecosystem, which is able to host top-down and bottom-up processes of knowledge and communication. In these terms, the past is generated and coded by “a simulation process”. Thus, from the first phases of data acquisition in the field, the technical methodologies and technologies that we use, influence in a decisive way all the subsequent phases of interpretation and communication.

Thus, the questions which we pose in a phase of bottom-up knowledge (for example, in an archaeological excavation) will influence the top-down phases of interpretation, or the mental patterns (for example, a comparative analysis and reconstruction of models). From this derives the need to interconnect the top-down processes with the bottom-up in accordance with a reciprocal systemic interaction, for example in a virtual space where both sequences can coexist. If we peremptorily separate knowledge and communication, we risk losing information along the way, reducing the relationships that are constructed between acquisition/input and transmission/output.

Archaeological communication ought to be understood as a process of validation of the entire cognitive process of understanding and not as a simple addendum to research, or as a dispensable compendium of data. Finally, example of reconstruction and communication of ancient worlds, will be presented in different categories of 3D representation and interaction: Virtual Reality (collaborative environments), 3D WEB GIS, 3D on line communities.