Unlocking Digital Archaeology: In Between Humans and Artificial Brains

Virtual Archaeology (1996), Cyberarchaeology (2008) and AI-Archaeology (2022) mark important milestones in the history of digital visualization of the past. The simulation process underpins the relationship between these three research domains. Indeed, if we have a better grasp of the past, it is because of the numerous simulations and models in which human minds, computational and artificial intelligence interact to generate a higher level of informative content.

Future research will therefore focus primarily on two areas: 1) the study of human brains in relation to the perception of virtual models and material culture (neuroarchaeology); 2) the application of artificial intelligence and virtual reality to approach the interpretation process in innovative ways. In VR-real-time scenarios, generative
AI could review digital consistency research challenges within an unlimited framework of different hypotheses. Given the regime of ambiguity with which we contend and the fact that our interpretations, whether archaeological or historical, are always extremely subjective, we "perform the past" rather than recreate it, according to this methodological perspective. In other words, the more virtual/digital situations we generate, the more capable we are to reinterpreting a place, monument, landscape, or relic. A generative process could one day solve the unsolvable problem of time (4D) representation: the building of the past as a fluid, co-evolving, perceptual, and continuous process.

In the near future, AI archaeology could be considered as a generative-autopoietic system that generates its own hypotheses, digital codes, models, and syntaxes in between human and artificial brains.
This event is co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Workshop, The Program in Digital Studies, and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures.

Originally aired February 2023

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