Internet Archaeol 15. Goodrick and Earl. Field techniques and data collection

3.2 Field techniques and data collection

The perceived problem of data collection in virtual archaeology is often greater than the reality. Standard techniques developed to collect field survey and GIS data are usually more than adequate to meet the needs of virtual archaeology — indeed sub-sampling to produce a dataset of manageable proportions is often the biggest difficulty. The real problem is the importation of this data into the virtual reality system. Where new data collection techniques are needed, such as the stones at Avebury (Gillings 1999; Pollard and Gillings 1998) methodologies are usually available, if not within the archaeological community then possibly within those associated disciplines, such as geography, who have taken a more pro-active part in the adoption and development of virtual reality techniques. In each case what is necessary is for the many methodologies currently being developed and used to be brought together and documented, making them readily accessible to the archaeological community. This would not only eliminate duplication of effort in development of methodologies but also democratise the implementation of virtual archaeology.