Signs, Simulation, and Cyborgs: Digital Spaces as Archaeology скачать в хорошем качестве

Signs, Simulation, and Cyborgs: Digital Spaces as Archaeology

In 2025 The Council for British Archaeology and CIfA's Early Careers Special Interest Group ran an online conference for early career archaeologists and heritage specialists to share their interests and research. The conference was delivered during Youth Day sponsored by the Royal Archaeological Institute as part of the CBA Festival of Archaeology. Speaker: Riley Finnigan Blurb: Archaeology as a field, in recent decades, has entered a digital paradigm. The increasing use of practices such as 3D modelling, data sharing, and volumetric recording coupled with the utilisation of modern technological advancements such as drones, computers, and quality cameras has been the primary motivator behind this paradigmatic shift. Thus, modern archaeology finds itself investigating the physical through the digital; the material and immaterial are becoming ever more inexorably linked. This shift is not merely limited to the adoption of technological advancements and techniques in the field; it is also linked to the burgeoning field of cyberarchaeology. Cyberarchaeology is the postmodern evolution of virtual archaeology, it fully embraces the notion of the hyperreal, and it is a domain where information, simulations, and interactivity are central to its function. Cyberarchaeology is used in a utilitarian manner and as such much of the focus is on what we, as archaeologists, can do to exploit technologies both in terms of physical hardware and digital software to perform physical archaeology. Much of the discourse surrounds the practical applications of cyberarchaeological techniques to real world sites, and how the datasets extracted from the various technologies can be used to reveal different things about a site. Cyberarchaeological approaches allow the different ontological aspects of a site to be examined, for example, the datasets generated via LiDAR, laser scanning, and GiS drone capture might overlap in the real physical space but when placed and processed virtually through computing software, they will reveal fundamentally different things about a site. Whilst the utilitarianism found within cyberarchaeology is highly valuable, it is somewhat limiting in its approach. The utilitarian attitude towards cyberarchaeology has shut off the exploration of digital spaces and their communities as places of heritage value. Whilst the subdiscipline embraces the medium of digital spaces as tools to be used by archaeologists, it ignores the possibility that these digital spaces themselves are archaeological in nature and can be investigated as such. This creates a ‘blind spot’ within the research and literature surrounding cyberarchaeology, holding back the subdiscipline from engaging entirely within its unique medium.