Dr. Vincent C. Pigott, (left) Associate Director for New Technologies, University of Pennsylvania Museum, talks with Thomas Carr, Ph.D. candidate (right) Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder, during the afternoon of the Virtual Dig.
With virtual dirt ground into the virtual wrinkles on their virtual knees, romantics who dream about archaeological digs, along with professionals who actually go on them, spent Saturday, March 22, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology exploring the ways that computer technology was augmenting--but not replacing--the real dirt.
An audience of more than 200 professionals and archaeology lovers heard the latest dirt on how topographical maps, low- and high-level aerial photos, satellite images, excavation notes and artifacts can be combined by the computer into a coherent, easily accessible format useful to field researchers, teachers and dig-ophiles.
The Virtual Dig was a day-long symposium on how technology has transformed the practice and teaching of archaeology. It also honored the University's celebration of the birth of ENIAC and the computer age 50 years ago.
People attending took virtual trips to Native American quarries in Montana, a reconstruction of Pompeii, a simulation of ancient Kar Shalmaneser on the Upper Euphrates and ancient Roman Corinth.
There in the year 44 B.C., a group of colonists intent on forming a new Roman city, arrived to rebuild on the site of Greek Corinth and to establish a system of roads.
Trying to recreate for his audience what the colonists found and then created, David G. Romano, keeper of the Mediterranean section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, explained that some of what he knew came from what archaeologists had been unearthing since 1896.
But much more of what he knew was thanks to modern technology and computers.
Romano and his team were able, from fairly sketchy physical evidence--the trace of a roadway here, the outlines of some fields there--to deduce with computers the grids of roads and fields established by the Romans in and around Corinth and around the nearby coastline. The new findings, unthinkable with only traditional methods, greatly increased the understanding of the original planning of the city and territory, and of the methods of ancient Roman urban planners in general.
Digging at some of the sites suggested by the computer has confirmed the computer projections. The 10-year-old project is ongoing.
Romano said his goal is to publish on the World Wide Web the entire city of Corinth, digitized stone by stone. In the meanwhile, his Web site (see box) gives a strong hint of what is to come.
Using new technologies, Thomas Carr, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Colorado, also found where to look for evidence of past inhabitants in this country. By analyzing on the computer multispectral data gleaned from satellite images, he was able to locate 12 potential ancient quarry sites in Montana.
Field work then enabled Carr to confirm that eight of those sites had actually been used as quarries, a conclusion that he might never have reached in his lifetime using only traditional methods.
The notion of technology-aided recording and exploration of archaeological sites, while it may accelerate the rate at which potential sites are identified and the knowledge from them extracted and recorded, still will not replace digging in the dirt. "It still requires field work, preliminary groundwork and subsequent field testing," said Carr.
While the new technological aids can't actually dig up the artifacts, they can help explain them. "We can use this to figure out where artifacts went to and where they came from. This is where it's going," he said.
Our technology-unaided survey of the audience at the Rainey Auditorium turned up a crowd impressed with the information.
Ralph Redford, a former executive with a company looking for oil and water in Oman, said the technology was similar. The archaeologists "were only scratching the surface," he quipped. He and his wife Lora, "interested amateurs" and members of the Archaeology Institute of America, had come up from Washington, D.C., for the seminar.
Greg Glover, from the Society of Biblical Literature ("It promotes the academic study of the Bible," he explained), came to see specific examples of archaeology software. His group was looking to "get into partnership with some of the excavations in Israel."
We found amongst the audience students young and middle-aged, Penn grads, numerous museum members--two of them had recently seen Corinth--and more people from Washington, D.C. We bumped into Philip P. Betancourt, from Temple University, one of the presenters in the afternoon technology fair, who said he was working on a CD-ROM of the Museum's collection.
Other technological wonders included an exploration of Virtual Pompeii, and simulated digs appropriate for classroom use. One of them, called "The Virtual Dig," by Harold L. Dibble, the Museum's curator of the European archaeology section, can function as a "virtual field school," allowing students an opportunity to design and carry out an excavation on their own.
The symposium, sponsored by MUSEE and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, was one of three in March and April at the Museum open to the public as well as scholars.
The other two are the upcoming annual Maya Weekend, April 12 and 13, and the recent American Archaeology in Classical Lands: The Next 100 Years, held March 1. To register, contact the Museum's special events office.
Get out your virtual shovels and dig these Internet sites that join archaeology and technology:
- http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~dromano/corinth.html
- http://csaws.brynmawr.edu:443/csa.html
- http://topas.rec.ri.cmu.edu/files/pompeii
- http://www.dalton.org/groups/nltl/nltl_projects/archaeotype.html
- http://www.learningsites.com
- http://www.nltl.columbia.edu/groups/rome/
- http://www.spacelab.net/~jsj/
- http://www.upenn.edu/museum_pubs/frames.html
Return to Compass Features for April 1, 1997