Abstract
This paper reviews and evaluates the potential use of modern visualization techniques in archaeology. It suggests the need to apply and develop such techniques as a central part of any modern archaeological investigation. The use of these methods is associated with wider questions about data representations, in particular, their integration with archaeological theory and their role in facilitating analysis and shaping interpretation. Concern for these questions and with the overall potential that information systems provide to capture, represent, analyze, and model archaeological information suggests the need for a new interdisciplinary focus, Archaeological Information Science. For such a focus to prosper, archaeologists need to develop additional skills that go beyond mere technical ones. They need to become more active in the design and creation of future information archaeological systems. To this end, archaeologists are urged to view this task as a way to extend archaeology in new directions and to recognize that the digital representation and treatment of archaeological information can generate new forms of doing archaeology.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Andrienko, G., Andrienko, N., Jankowski, P., Keim, D., Kraak, M.-J., & MacEachren, A. (2007). Visual analytics for spatial decision support: Setting the research agenda. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 21(8), 839–857.
Bailey, G. (2007). Time perspectives, palimpsests and the archaeology of time. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 26, 198–223.
Barceló, J. A., & Vicente, O. (2004). Some problems in archaeological excavation 3D modeling. In K. F. Ausserer, W. Börner, M. Goriany, & L. Karlhuber-Vöckl (Eds.), Enter the past: The e-vay into the four dimensions of cultural heritage CAA 2003, Computer applications and quantitative methods in archaeology. BAR international series 1227 (pp. 400–404). Oxford: Archaeopress.
Barceló, J. A., Forte, M., Sanders, D. (2000). Virtual Reality in archaeology. Oxford: BAR International Series 843, Archaeopress.
Barrett, J. C. (1987). Contextual archaeology. Antiquity, 61(233), 468–473.
Barrett, J. C. (1994). Fragments from antiquity: An archaeology of social life in Britain 2900–1200 BC. Oxford: Blackwell.
Benko, H., Ishak, E. W., & Feiner, S. (2004). Collaborative mixed reality visualization of an archaeological excavation. In 3rd IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2004), 2–5 November 2004 (pp. 132–140). Arlington: IEEE Computer Society.
Bertin, J. [1967] (1983). Semiology of graphics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Boucher de Perthes, J. (1847). Antiquites celtiques et antediluvienes. Memoire sur l’industrie primitive et les arts a leur origine, vol. 10. Paris: Treuttel and Wertz.
Brodlie, K. W., Carpenter, L. A., Earnshaw, R. A., Gallop, J. R., Hubbard, R. J., Mumford, A. M., et al. (Eds.). (1992). Scientific visualization, techniques and applications. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Bunge, M. (1973). Method, model and matter. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Card, S. K., Mackinlay, J. D., & Shneiderman, B. (1999). Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Chen, C. (1999). Information visualization: Beyond the horizon. London: Springer-Verlag.
Chippindale, C. (2000). Capta and data: On the true nature of archaeological information. American Antiquity, 65, 605–612.
Cleveland, W. S. (1994). The elements of graphing data (2nd ed.). Lafayette: Hobart Press.
Close, A. E. (2006). Finding the people who flaked the stone at english camp (San Juan Island). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Couclelis, H. (1992). People manipulate objects (but cultivate fields): Beyond the raster-vector debate in GIS. In A. U. Frank, I. Campari, & U. Formentini (Eds.), Theories and methods of spatio-temporal reasoning in geographic space. Lecture notes in computational science 639 (pp. 65–77). Pisa: Springer-Verlag.
Crescioli, M., Niccolucci, F., & D’Andrea, A. (2002). XML Encoding of archaeological unstructured data. In G. Burenhult (Ed.), Archaeological informatics: Pushing the envelope CAA2001. Computer applications and quantitative methods in archaeology. BAR International series 1016 (pp. 267–275). Oxford: Archaeopress.
Criado Boado, F., & Villoch Vázquez, V. (2000). Monumentalizing landscape: From present perception to the past meaning of galician megalithism (NW Iberian Peninsula). European Journal of Archaeology, 3(2), 188–216.
Cummings, V., Jones, A., & Watson, A. (2002). Divided places: Phenomenology and asymmetry in the monuments of the Black Mountains, Southeast Wales. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 12, 57–70.
DeMarrais, E. (1996). The Materialization of Culture. In E. DeMarrais, C. Gosden, & C. Renfrew (Eds.), Rethinking materiality: The engagement of mind with the material world (pp. 11–21). Cambridge: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Dibble, H. L., & McPherron, S. P. (1988). On the computerization of archaeological projects. Journal of Field Archaeology, 15(4), 431–440.
Dobres, M., & Robb, J. (Eds.). (2000). Agency in archaeology. London: Routledge.
Dykes, J., MacEachren, A., & Kraak, M.-J. (2005). Exploring geovisualization. Oxford: Elsevier Press.
Earl, G. P., & Wheatley, D. W. (2002). Virtual reconstruction and the interpretative process: A case-study from Avebury. In D. W. Wheatley, G. P. Earl, & S. Poppy (Eds.), Contemporary themes in archaeological computing (pp. 5–15). Oxford: Oxbow.
Fekete, J-D., van Wijk, J. J., Stasko, J. T., North, C. (2008). The value of information visualization. In A. Kerren, J-D. Fekete, J.T. Stasko, C. North (Eds.), Information visualization:Human centered issues and perspectives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4950: 1–18.
Forte, M. (Ed.). (1997). Virtual archaeology: Great discoveries brought to life through virtual reality. London: Thames and Hudson.
Frischer, B. (2008). Introduction: From digital illustration to digital heuristics. In B. Frischer & A. Dakouri-Hild (Eds.), Beyond illustration: 2d and 3d Digital Technologies as Tools for Discovery in Archaeology (para 1.44). Oxford: Archaeopress. (http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.90045).
Frischer, B., & Dakouri-Hild, A. (2008). Beyond illustration: 2d and 3d digital technologies as tools for discovery in archaeology. Oxford: Archaeopress. (http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.90045)
Gaffney, C. (2008). Detecting trends in the prediction of the buried past: A review of geophysical techniques in archaeology. Archaeometry, 50(2), 313–336.
Gell, A. (1998). Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon.
Gillings, M. (2004). The real, the virtually real and the hyperreal: The role of VR in archaeology. In S. Moser & S. Smiles (Eds.), Envisioning the past (pp. 223–239). Oxford: Blackwell.
Gillings, M., & Goodrick, G.T. (1996). Sensuous and Reflexive GIS: Exploring Visualisation and VRML. Internet Archaeology 1.
Gooding, D. C. (2008). Envisioning explanation: The art in science. In B. Frischer & A. Dakouri-Hild (Eds.), Beyond illustration: 2d and 3d Digital Technologies as Tools for Discovery in Archaeology (para. 45–74). Oxford: Archaeopress. (http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.90045)
Goodrick, G., & Gillings, M. (2000). Constructs, simulations and hyperreal worlds: the role of virtual reality (VR) in archaeological research. In G. Lock & K. Brown (Eds.), On the theory and practice of archaeological computing (pp. 41–48). Oxford: OUCA.
Gosden, C., & Marshall, Y. (1999). The cultural biography of objects. World Archaeology, 31(2), 169–178.
Gray, J., & Walford, K. (1999). One Good Site Deserves Another: Electronic Publishing in Field Archaeology. Internet Archaeology 7.
Grayson, D. K. (1984). Quantitative zooarchaeology: Topics in the analysis of archaeological faunas. Orlando: Academic.
Hamilton, S., Whitehouse, R., Brown, K., Combes, P., Herring, E., & Thomas, M. S. (2006). Phenomenology in practice: Towards a methodology for a ‘subjective’ approach. European Journal of Archaeology, 9(1), 31–71.
Harris, E. (1989). Principles of archaeological stratigraphy. London: Academic.
Harrower, M., & Fabrikant, S. (2008). The role of map animation for geographic visualization. In D. M. Dodge, M. McDerby, & M. Turner (Eds.), Geographic visualization: Concepts, tools and applications. London: Wiley and Sons.
Helbing, D., Keltsch, J., & Molnár, P. (1997). Modelling the evolution of human trail systems. Nature, 388, 47–50.
Hodder, I. (1987). The archaeology of contextual meanings. New directions in archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hodder, I. (1999). The archaeological process. An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Holdaway, S., & Wandsnider, L. (2008). Time in archaeology: Time perspectivism revisited. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Huisman, O., Feliciano Santiago, I., Kraak, M.-J., & Retsios, B. (2009). Developing a geovisual analytics environment for investigating archaeological events: Extending the space-time cube. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 36(3), 225–236.
Isaksen, L., Martinez, K., Gibbins, N. Earl, G., Keay, S., (forthcoming). Linking Archaeological Data. Proceedings Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) 2009. Williamburg.
Jefferey, S., & Aitchison, K. (2008). Who works in digital archaeology?. Archaeological Data Service News, 22 (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/newsletter/issue22/jeffery.html)
Johnson, B., & Shneiderman, B. (1991). Treemaps: A Space Filling Approach to the Visualization of Hierarchical Information Structures. In Proceedings., IEEE Conference on Visualization, Issue 22–25 (pp. 284 91). IEEE Press.
Jones, A. (2007). Memory and material culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kintigh, K. W. (2006). The promise and challenge of archaeological data integration. American Antiquity, 71(3), 567–578.
Kohler, T. A., & Gumerman, G. J. (Eds.). (2000). Dynamics in human societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kohler, T. A., & van der Leeuw, S. E. (2007). The model-based archaeology of socionatural systems. Santa Fe: SAR Press.
Kopytoff, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life in things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 64–91). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leucci, G., & Negri, S. (2006). Use of ground penetrating radar to map subsurface archaeological features in an urban area. Journal of Archaeological Science, 33, 502–512.
Lewin, K. (1938). The conceptual representation and the measurement of psychological forces. Durnham: Duke University Press.
Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science: selected theoretical papers. New York: Harper and Bros.
Llobera, M. (2007). Reconstructing visual landscapes. World Archaeology, 39(1), 51–69.
Lock, G. (2003). Using computers in archaeology: towards virtual pasts. London: Routledge.
Lock, G., & Harris, T. (1992). Visualizing spatial data: the importance of geographic information systems. In P. Reilly & S. P. Q. Rahtz (Eds.), Archaeology and the information age: a global perspective (pp. 81–96). London: Routledge.
Losier, L.-M., Pouliot, J., & Fortin, M. (2007). 3D geometrical modeling of excavation units at the archaeological site of Tell ‘Acharneh (Syria). Journal of Archaeological Science, 34, 272–288.
Lucas, G. (2001). Critical approaches to fieldwork: Contemporary and historical archaeological practice. London: Routledge.
Lucas, G. (2005). The archaeology of time. Themes in archaeology. London: Routledge.
Lynch, M., & Woolgar, S. (Eds.). (1990). Representation in scientific practice. Cambridge: MIT Press.
McManamon, F. P., & Kintigh, K. W. (2010). Digital antiquity: Transforming archaeological data into knowledge. SAA Archaeological Record, 10(2), 37–40.
McPherron, S. J. P., & Dibble, H. L. (2000). The lithic assemblages of Pech de L’Azé IV (Dordogne, France). Préhistoire Européen, 15, 9–43.
McPherron, S. J. P., Dibble, H. L., & Goldberg, P. (2005). Z. Geoarchaeology, 20(3), 243–262.
Meskell, L. (2004). Divine Things. In E. DeMarrais, C. Gosden, & C. Renfrew (Eds.), Rethinking materiality: The engagement of mind with the material world (pp. 249–260). Oxford: McDonald Institute Monographs, Oxbow.
Miller, W. J., & Wentz, E. A. (2003). Representation and Spatial Analysis in geographic information systems. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93, 574–594.
Moore, H. L. (1986). Space, text and gender: An anthropological study of the Marakwet of Kenya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moser, S., & Smiles, S. (Eds.). (2005). Envisioning the past: Archaeology and the image. Oxford: Blackwell.
Niccolucci, F. (Ed.). (2002). Virtual archaeology proceedings of the VAST Euroconference, Arezzo 24–26 November 2000. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Orton, C. (1982). Computer simulation experiments to assess the performance of measures of quantity of pottery. World Archaeology, 14, 1–20.
Orton, C. (1993). How many pots make five: An historical review of pottery quantification. Archaeometry, 35, 169–184.
Reilly, P., & Rahtz, S. (1992). Archaeology in the Information Age: A Global Perspective. One World Archaeology 21. London: Routledge.
Richards, J. D. (2006). Archaeology, e-publication and the Semantic Web. Antiquity, 80, 970–979.
Schiffer, M. B. (1972). Archaeological context and systemic context. American Antiquity, 37, 156–165.
Scott, S. A. (1991). Problems with the use of flake size in inferring stages of lithic reduction. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 13, 177–178.
Snow, D. R., Gahegan, M., Giles, C. L., Hirth, K. G., Milner, G. R., Mitra, P., et al. (2006). Information science: Enhanced: Cybertools and archaeology. Science, 311(5763), 958–959.
Thomas, J., & Cook, K.A. (Eds.), (2005). Illuminating the Path: The Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics. IEEE CS Press.
Tufte, E. R. (1990). Envisioning information. Cheshire: Graphics Press.
Tufte, E. R. (1997). Visual explanations. Cheshire: Graphics Press.
Tufte, E.R. [1983] (1998). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd Ed. Cheshire: Graphics Press.
Tukey, J. W. (1977). Exploratory data analysis. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Van Fraasen, B. C. (2008). Scientific representation: Paradoxes of perspective. Oxford: Clarendon.
Winterbottom, S. J., & Long, D. (2006). From abstract digital models to rich virtual environments: landscape contexts in Kilmartin Glen, Scotland. Journal of Archaeological Science, 33, 1356–1367.
Wong, P., & Thomas, J. (2004). Visual Analytics. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 24(5), 20–21.
Wylie, A. (1999). Rethinking unity as a “Working Hypothesis” for philosophy of science: How archaeologists exploit the disunities of science. Perspectives on Science, 7, 293–317.
Wylie, A. (2002). Thinking from things: Essays in the philosophy of archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Yarrow, T. (2008). In context: Meaning, materiality and agency in the process of archaeological recording. In C. Knappett (Ed.), Material agency: towards a nonanthropocentric approach (pp.121–138). New York: Springer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Llobera, M. Archaeological Visualization: Towards an Archaeological Information Science (AISc). J Archaeol Method Theory 18, 193–223 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-010-9098-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-010-9098-4