Digital Archaeology
The description of digital archaeology necessarily includes the application of computational techniques, GIS, visualization, 3D modeling, and digital media to archaeological research.
Digital media, virtual collaborative environments, and new pedagogical approaches based on digital technology are making substantial contributions to the archaeological sciences. Museums and cultural heritage institutions are now sites of digital innovations in archaeometry (techniques and technology to determine the age and circumstances of the origin of archaeological artifacts), virtual worlds, augmented reality (the combination of virtual, computer-simulated reality and physical, material reality) and immersive systems (Liritzis et al., 2016).
However, some scholars, while agreeing that digital tools are not only helpful but necessary, question whether digital archaeology can intellectually aspire to develop new paradigms based on digital technology capable of transforming the discipline (Huggett, 2015). University of Glasgow digital archaeologist Jeremy Huggett suggested that digital archaeology needs “grand challenges”. One response includes focusing on learning and pedagogy enabled by digital technology (Peuramaki-Brown et al., 2020). Additionally, digital archaeology can benefit from a data-centric methodology to address the “data deluge” in archaeology. Instead of uncritically adopting “Big Data” methods typical of other disciplines, a creative integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and pattern recognition and human cognitive abilities is needed to promote new insights and understanding of important societal phenomena, and to enable interpretation and to provide semantic content to these data (Niccolucci, 2020).
As an example of a large-scale digital archaeological initiative, Delphi4Delphi (Digital Enterprise for Learning Practice of Heritage Initiative for Delphi) is a scholarly attempt to reconstruct archaeological artifacts in Delphi, Greece, using three dimensional (3D) imaging and reconstruction. The project uses digital photography and optical imaging to generate 3D models from sequences of two dimensional (2D) images. This technique allows the depth dimension in a scene to be reconstructed. The subsequent output is recorded in a 3D data format. Another system employs stereo photography, resulting in 3D panoramic views of heritage sites and architectural structures. During the first season of the project, the generated data set had an approximate size of 300 GB, allowing the material culture of Delphi to be analyzed (Liritzis et al., 2016).