부산대학교 도서관

What is Virtual Archaeology (from now on abbreviated as VA) really? And what is virtual? In a period of great technological-digital evolution in all scientific fields, it is even more important to try to decipher, monitor and critically describe the state of the art, with particular attention to those interdisciplinary areas which will represent the avant-garde of future research. The great communicative impact that archaeology offers in itself is greatly enhanced by the possible digital interfaces and by the comprehensibility that these provide for much more than the scientific community. Therefore, considering what has been noted in this overview and what will be discussed below, VA can be defined as digital reconstructive archaeology, computational epistemology applied to the reconstruction of three dimensional archaeological ecosystems, therefore, cognitive ecology. The epistemological aspect is essential in the assessment of computational processes and therefore, in archaeological activity. To the out-going elaboration one must increase the cognitive significance of the in-going data (“augmented” reality). The context is cognitively greater than the sum of its components and we must identify the “environment” of the VA in a structuralist sense. In the assessment of the application of VA therefore, an epistemological measurement is essential; if, in fact, we try to “measure” the cognitive quality of models there is a risk of completely destructuring the information in respect to the context. Moreover it is evident that virtual space, in the archaeological dimension, must be contextualised and hierarchically restructured in order to allow for the identification of the logical units of information in the geometry of the models; theoretically one should “undo” and “redo” the context to completely verify the geometric and functional system. Key words might be 3D, interaction, virtual models, and other variables described in the text.