A manufactured past: virtual reality in archaeology

¹ Museum of Antiquities, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK.
² Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BF, UK.
Glyn Goodrick g.t.goodrick@ncl.ac.uk Graeme Earl graeme.earl@soton.ac.uk

Cite this as: Goodrick, G. and Earl, G. 2004 A manufactured past: virtual reality in archaeology, Internet Archaeology 15. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.15.2

Summary

Virtual reality and visualisation technologies developed over the past thirty years have been readily accessible to the archaeological community since the mid 1990s. Despite the high profile of virtual archaeology (Reilly 1991) both within the media and professional archaeology it has not been taken on board as a generally useful and standard technique by archaeologists. In this article we wish to discuss the technical and other issues which have resulted in a reluctance to adopt virtual archaeology and, more importantly, discuss ways forward that can enable us routinely to benefit from this technology in the diversity of archaeological practice.

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Features

• This article will appeal to: multimedia developers working with museums and heritage media, archaeological researchers interested in the modelling of space, computer scientists interested in the applications of emerging and established graphics technologies, students of archaeology interested in representation and computation
• Key Features: considers the diverging discipline of archaeological graphics as a single field
• Keywords: Virtual Reality; Virtual Archaeology; Reconstruction; X3D; VRML

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Last updated: Wed Jan 28 2004