VIRTUAL ARCHAEOLOGY, KNOWLEDGE AND COMMUNICATION

Maurizio Forte,
University of California, Merced
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts

When the terms “virtual archaeology” was introduced and popularized (Forte 1997; Forte 2000), most academics reacted to it with extreme caution, lack of understanding, or with hostile polemics, both for terminological reasons and, especially, because of the difficulty (which one could, indeed, sympathize with) of imaging the scientific (and not just the didactic) potential of 3D worlds, both those reconstructed ex novo (“virtual antiquity”) and those documenting the current state of archaeological remains (“observed antiquity”). I believe that this diffidence was motivated by the difficulty of imagining the 3D model as an interactive, a multimodal, and—especially—a holistic container of information, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed there is no doubt but that a 3D model, be it of a landscape or of a monument, can add information and thus insight to what we already knew, at least if the model is correctly built. In fig. 1, for example, is shown the cyber map of the VR system of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. This 3D navigable map represents the geo referenced information provided by the model. The 3D geometric model of the cyber map shows by means of different forms and colors the relationships that develop at every multimedia node/theme within the system: iconography, style, light, color, composition, and space (Forte et al. 2002). In this case the cyber map seeks to demonstrate that information, if associated with conceptual-spatial models, is a better instructional tool than are traditional means (scholarly lectures, papers, textbook descriptions, etc.). That is to say, in a VR system of this kind, the interaction occurs in X,Y,Z coordinates and this leads to the creation of a mental map of the monument which subsequently grows upon contact with the actual monument. The cybermap demonstrates in an eloquent way how the third dimension permits us to build a new cognitive geometry of the cultural artifact, especially if, as in this case, it is associated with narrative and communicative sequences.

Fig. 1: Cybermap of the VR system of the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua

The balance sheet of the last twenty years of archaeological research on the application of the third dimension as a research tool is fairly depressing: the use of 3D representations has been completely random and thus has not had a great impact on the development of research methodologies and protocols. Only rarely is adequate time and attention paid to them in university courses and programs of study. There are, of course, a few courageous exceptions, but to the extent that 3D has made it into the curriculum, it has been at the level of short, post-graduate training courses. As for fieldwork, here the picture is much the same: the use of 3D technologies for data capture, analysis, and reconstruction is still considered experimental and is thus still quite rare. In the best of circumstances, 3D is used to represent data collected by hand and in two dimensions and/or integrating spatial information that is either not correct or simply invented. This leads to a first and complete separation between knowledge acquisition and knowledge communication, a sequence we hold to be the cybernetic vehicle necessary for cultural transmission. If the 3D world constructs its own holistic models based on unreliable or hard-to-test information, then the result in archaeological methodology is a lack of transparency as well as a lack of semiotic super-positioning of the sources of knowledge. To give one example, it is one thing to create a 3D model of a site drawn manually on a plan, and it is quite another to do so on the basis of a corresponding point cloud of data points collected by a laser scanner or by some other digital technology.

The issue is not trivial because the ontology of archaeological information, or the cybernetics of archaeology, refers to all the inter-connective relationships which the datum produces, the code (or the “map,” as Bateson 1972, calls it) 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. Thus, from the first phases of data acquisition in the field, the technical methodologies and technologies we use influence in a decisive way all the subsequent phases of interpretation and communication. In the light of these considerations, what is the relationship between information and representation? How much information does a digital model contain? What sort and how many ontologies ought to be chosen to permit an acceptable transmittability? These and many other questions on related topics take on certain urgency because they relate directly to the loss of information from understanding, learning, and the transmittability of culture.

Indeed, our ability to transmit culture depends on a model which combines on the same axis processes of understanding 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. But the methodological tradition which we inherit has almost always separated the realm of fieldwork, reports, and publications from the realm of cultural communication, which is too often popularized and marginalized under the vague term “didactic.” To the contrary, the grand challenge posed by digital technologies is to integrate the ontologies of data into a single process: digital acquisition, digital processing, digital communication (online and off-line). Every conceivable segmentation of this process leads to a loss of data and of knowledge and to a diminution of the social impact of research: what is not perceived cannot be communicated. Moreover communication often is marginalized precisely because it ought to face the difficult challenge of proposing hypotheses of reconstructing the ancient world, harmonizing the observed and observable data within models that seem to be arbitrary. The lack of scientific communication causes the discipline of archaeology to have less social import than it might otherwise have, causing a sort of cultural solipsism and low level of transmittability.

Once the phase of the technological “wow factor” has passed—i.e., the moment in which the aesthetics of models seemed to have a higher priority than the accuracy and quantity of the information they conveyed--we enter into the current phase in which researchers must raise epistemological questions to enable their discipline advance methodologically. The quantity of models (geometric, epistemological, cultural, spatial, etc.) which digital technologies have been able to produce is impressive and grows at a constantly increasing rate. This phenomenon cannot be culturally digested without suitable methodological and theoretical reflections. It is the purpose of this paper to offer a sketch of a possible starting point for such reflections.

Methodology of Archaeological Research

One of the indisputable results of multidisciplinarity in archaeology is continually to pose new questions about research methodology and the use of applied technologies. It is difficult to construct complex ontologies of data if research does not ask new questions. Information per se does not create knowledge, but it constitutes its precondition in accordance with a process of selection: “selection filters the noise and reveals at the same time the information, channeling it into patterns that will result in understanding” (Taylor 2005: 261). The path from understanding to communication is thus selective regarding information and propaedeutic regarding the dissemination and transmission of culture. To select information we must process it in accordance with a valid sequence of acquisition, modeling, representation, and communication. In this sense it is useful to distinguish between accumulated (i.e., not selected) knowledge and the quality of perceived (selected) information. The indiscriminate accumulation and growth of databases, catalogues, and geometric data (one thinks of the millions of points in point clouds created by laser scanners) present serious problems of information management and of knowledge which concern the relationships between data and perceptions.

In the archaeology of landscapes, for example, the reconstruction of the ancient landscape presents a focal and often unsolved problem precisely because the data are too sketchy and the analysis of the territory does not pose questions appropriate to the study of ecosystems but remains limited solely to human activities. In contrast, if one analyzes the landscape as an organism, relationships and activities come to light which would have otherwise not appear in other contexts. If we do not raise the right research questions, it is obvious that we do not have data adequate to create reconstructive models. So, what happens to the pathway leading from archaeological knowledge to communication? If in the phase of input/research the right questions are not asked, the phase of output/communication will of necessity be lacunose and will not support an adequate monitoring of the path of understanding, following the progressive transformation of the various ontologies of information.

Bottom-up and Top-down

The activity of archaeological research follows rules of the types bottom-up and top-down. In fieldwork, the activity of understanding starts from the lowest level (bottom-up) insofar as precognitive perception is addressed in the identification of forms, patterns, crop-marks, structures, etc. which come to light in the course of archaeological investigation. The bottom-up process follows rules of “pattern recognition,” i.e., it identifies borders, forms, and outlines in such as way as to unite mentally the residual traces on the ground to the point where a (stratigraphic, structural, taxonomic, etc.) map can be created. This activity produces discrete (topographical, excavation, etc.) maps, basically composed of vectors, lines, and polylines which presuppose interpretative actions and logics of perception. In contrast, the process of interpretation, which follows top-down rules, functions from high to low, according to the mental patterns which our cognitive experience uses as elements of comparison.

The bottom-up phase of research, especially in the case of archaeological research, is very delicate because it results in the first set of information (often with destructive consequences for the stratigraphy) and hence is propaedeutic to understanding. It extrapolates from the chaos/noise of the information a cybernetic pattern which becomes fundamental for the top-down phase. Next follows the bottom-up phase of survey which should be as careful as possible and concerned to show and validate all the relationships useful for creation of the mental map.

From this discussion we can infer that archaeological understanding is a process of interaction between bottom-up and top-down rules. The construction of cybernetic maps as a result of this interaction constructs codified information which, in the end, can be transmitted. The transmission then takes place through publication tools that are both linear (books, paper, exhibitions, etc.) and non-linear or reticular (multimedia, Web, VR). In the process of standardization of archaeological data destined to be published, there is no doubt but that a hiatus is created between what we call knowledge (or, the scientific knowledge codified for a few experts) and that which we call communication (information shared by and codified for the public). The problem with digital artifacts, as has been correctly seen by Settis (Settis 2002), is that starting from the second half of the 1980s, they have been used in attempts to resolve the problem structurally with an exaggerated technological inventiveness which has not led to positive results. Digital artifacts have mainly been created purely with the goal of archiving knowledge (but in a retrograde and only pseudo-standardized way) and not with the aim of the multidisciplinary virtualization of information. Thus, on the one hand researchers have undertaken the creation of enormous databases, but, on the other hand, they have delegated to multimedia the task of transmitting cultural information that has been “popularized” for didactic use. Here, again, we find the two realms of knowledge and communication to be distinct. The multimedia products have too often followed the model of linear media, translating into digital format the semiotic formulae of print media with little added value from the digital per se.

It is clear that at this point that the above-mentioned problem of digital artifacts has generated no little confusion: in what way, then, do we ask of archaeological communication that it provide the information gathered from research? Is a strict line of demarcation really needed between knowledge and communication? To have concrete and far-reaching results from the application of digital technology to archaeology, it is indispensable to launch a new cultural policy and a new policy for scientific research.

The methodology of research ought to offer an important space for discussion to cybernetic archaeology, in the etymological sense of the term. Without adequate epistemological reflection, a methodology incorporating a theory of information cannot exist, nor can an absolute cognitive value of technology. According to Bateson’s cybernetics, context does not exist without communication, without an exchange of information. We must thus create new codes, new maps, new itineraries of knowledge. The factor of transmittability of culture will depend in a massive way on digital technologies.

Eureka!

A 3D model, be it individual or belonging to a VR system, ought also to be considered a dynamic process, i.e., dependent on interaction and feedback: in action and in 3D behavior we increase the “difference” in a cybernetic sense, thus we learn more and faster. The exchange between mind and model represents the key moment of interpretation: the image re-projected onto the retina is coded and interpreted by the mind; and it is in this precise instant that we become aware of it. In the top-down phase, mental processing classifies the interpretation with respect to experience and contextualizes it on the basis of our cultural background. In the dynamic characterization of a 3D model is thus implied, as noted above, an acquisition of a greater amount of information, a structured whole, a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Learning is a process that is essentially dynamic (i.e., an exchange between the learner and his environment), and interpretation results from the dynamic between interaction and the recognition of information. In this regard we recall a paradigmatic experience: working on the reconstruction of the archaeological landscape of Aksum, we used a panchromatic aerial photograph dating from the 1960s which we superimposed onto the digital terrain model. The same aerial photograph was systematically used by the archaeologists who worked for years on the ground and who had already identified numerous features that could be understood as possible ancient anthropic modifications of the terrain. Superimposing the photo in texture mapping the DTM, we simulated in real time a flight at low altitude. This simulation, through the dynamics of interaction, allowed the archaeologists to recognize some new anthropic features of the landscape which up to that moment they had not noticed or reported. Whence came this additional information, given the fact that the photograph remained the same? Can we speak of something the archaeologists had simply missed or of their insufficient experience in reading aerial photographs? Such reasons certainly would not be applicable in this case since the archaeologists had been working at Aksum for many years (M. Forte, K. Bard, R. Fattovich, M. Foccillo, A. Manzo, C. Perlingeri 2001). The catalyst was identified as the 3D dynamic visualization, the multiple points of view offered by the simulation, and by the simulation of light and shadow in the virtual flight. Thus the difference in a cybernetic sense was determined by the dynamic nature of the model and by the process of interaction, from the holistic relationships of the model with the landscape and especially with the overlaid elements.

Another example of 3D cybernetic exchange was tried in the creation of a VR system of the Scrovegni Chapel (Forte et al. 2002), where a 3D cybermap was projected with the goal of representing the information and behavior of the VR system, following an interface that was basically aniconic, i.e., the space without the images that characterize and contextualize it. In the case of the Scrovegni Chapel, the pictorial registers of Giotto which make up the monument’s palimpsest of images constitute the primary source of literacy and learning both in the real world and in the virtual. If, in contrast to this, we use as metaphors of navigation the geometrical solids of the cybermap, we enter into intra-informational behavior, i.e., we move in cybernetic hyperspace, in relationships that each feature of the map produces. The cybermap seeks to simulate, even if in a completely approximate way, the behavior of the mind which proceeds by means of associations, hypertexts, cross-references, etc.: each element of 3D space is interconnected and transmits the codes of the context to which it belongs.

From what we know about the activities of mirror neurons, the imitative process is a fundamental part of the dynamic of learning and refers to the way in which the mental images we perceive take shape (Rizzolatti et alii, 2001). The consciousness of action elsewhere produces an induced mental effect and from this the beginnings of knowledge arise. The awareness and the consciousness of information are key elements which distinguish the evolution of the human mind from that of the Neanderthals. We might call it the “cognitive big bang,” because it revolutionizes thought and from it presumably arises the aesthetic principle which constitutes the artifact. The mind of Homo Sapiens in fact represents in toto all the faculties of knowledge, consciousness and transmittability of information and of codes. A recent book, The Mind in the Cave (Wilson-Lewis 2002), draws attention to the cognitive revolution brought about by pre-historic cave painting. Wilson-Lewis posits a vigorous aesthetic action in cave painting, aimed at reproducing 3D immersive effects that increase the perceptual feedback of those who are admitted to the rite or to its transmission/re-processing. The cavern becomes the 3D projection of shamanic vision, the immersive world of experience codified by means of symbols of cultural transmission. The extraordinary examples of Lascaux, Altamira and of other African caves offer the traces of the first cognitive experiments in the translation of artistic codes and symbolic complexes, perhaps the world’s first system of the symbolic construction of knowledge and of learning from structured iconic models. The environment of the cave was presumably chosen for its immersiveness, its elite status and for its ability to produce feedback, experiential narrativity, three-dimensional communication, relation affordances (see below for the meaning of this term). Here the relationships are not evoked to demonstrate the supernatural character of the experience but to understand the physical world by means of hyperreality, an informational increase in what is real. Understanding of the world occurs through a process of intermediation, the shaman, and the visionary representation of relationships not yet codified in the real world. The pre-historic pictures thus become the map of the natural world, the catalyst of new forms of knowledge and learning.

Conclusions

The extraordinary growth of information and digital technologies in archaeology raises urgent new questions about research methodology, knowledge and the dissemination of culture (Forte, 2003). In particular, the technologies of 3D acquisition and representation such as computer vision, photogrammetry, and laser scanning create information that has a complexity unimaginable a few years ago and whose codes of representation still must be defined and investigated. We do not adequately understand the cognitive processes which connect the geometric complexity of models with their representation. The key element on which we construct our codes, our maps, is the perception which first selects what is high-priority information and then transforms it into knowledge.

Thus, we do not know the cybernetic geometry of models and the related autopoetic and self-communicative capacity, but we do know that each model contains a universe of discrete information which, when inserted into a digital ecosystem, is able to develop relationships, retroactions, and interactions that were not suspected in advance and which modify our level of eco-informational knowledge. But we know that VR is destined to become a living organism made of artificial life and of spontaneous movement: it is not accidental that the concept of digital biology has already been theorized.

The methodological itinerary connecting knowledge and communication is a univocal process and ought to be inserted into a digital ecosystem, from bottom-up digital input (the methodologies of acquisition and postprocessing) to top-down digital output (the mental patterns and comparative analysis). In archaeology, in the phases of input we include the technologies of 3D documentation and modeling; in the output, the technologies of off-line and online VR (from the Web 3D GIS to virtual communities).

From this point of view it is clear that, if, first, information and, secondly, the process of understanding are maintained within a sequence of integrated digital protocols we have more opportunities not to lose data. In this methodological sequence learning occurs by difference, by means of cybernetic maps defined by transmission codes—something that Bateson describes as deutero-learning, or teaching how to learn to learn.

The digital reconstruction of the past is mainly a simulation process; this simulation represents a possible past and the interaction determines the level of communication and exchange with the space (uncoded), first, and the place (coded), then. The result of the mutual eco-interaction and feedback between users and environment constitutes the virtual heritage process. VR, for now mainly offline, but destined to migrate and settle permanent on the web, constitutes the concluding segment of a process of knowledge-communication, precisely because it is able to produce first difference, then knowledge and communication. Most part of the world seems to be interested mainly towards technological and digital aspects of the Virtual, but this direction is over-technological without a correct evaluation of the relations between mind and environment. We’d like imagine the Virtual like a 3D cyberspace in which artificial organisms and humans interact, move, grow on the basis of rules of the artificial societies and of the relations of the ecosystems; the realm of the Virtual, in technical sense, includes all the 3D worlds where the action/reaction/retroaction is free and in real time.

In network and collaborative environments cyberspaces and information are shared and the experience, subjective and objective, is embodied by avatars, actions, interactions, behaviors, navigations, dialogues, feelings, storytelling. This embodiment constitutes a new way of learning, communication and cultural transmission; in cybernetic terms it is a “mirror effect”, we can display our action and mind in someone’s embodiment. In this field a new project and virtual museum was created in Rome: “The Virtual Museum of the Ancient Via Flaminia”(www.vhlab.itabc.cnr.it/flaminia). The “Ancient Via Flaminia” was one of the most important roads of the Roman empire and the project is aimed to reconstruct the ancient landscape with the related archaeological sites, villas, mausoleums, necropolis. In this case, a Multiuser Domain has been created through the Virtools Multiuser Pack and the network of five computers. The system allows users to share and exchange information through a map of reciprocal messages. Messages indicate personal or collective status; for instance the avatar's movement is a personal status while the command to activate a movie is a collective status. If an avatar reaches a status, the software communicates it immediately to the other users attending the session. In this way the system becomes continuously updated creating a common process of knowledge and development.