From Photography to 3D Models and Beyond: visualizations in archaeology
- WORDSWORTH WORDSMITHY
- Mar 27, 2024
- 8 min read
What would it be like to debate philosophy with Plato, walk around the dusty streets of old Babylon, watch 1000s of perfectly cut stones become an immense pyramid, or buy some pottery from a vendor in a bustling ancient marketplace? These are not (entirely) fantasy or science fiction time-travel musings (Figure 1).
How do we know about the past? What is archaeology? Is it the collecting of information about the past? Or is it also the interpretation and understanding of the peoples and cultures of the past?
Ancient texts are very informative; so are the artifacts and buildings that survive from long-eclipsed cultures. When we find an object buried in the ground, we begin to imagine how old it might be, how it was used, who owned it, and how it got to that particular spot. For millennia, people have wondered those same things and seem to have been collecting their found objects. Trying to link things chanced upon with the people, places, and periods from which they originated has gone hand in hand with the collection of those objects. Ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, for example, all gathered objects from their past and all thought about how they connect to their present, who were their ancestors responsible for creating them, and what do they tell us?
Collecting was originally a personal thing. By the 3rd millennium BCE, collecting of exotic items, valuable or rare items, and items with writing on them became the province of royalty, especially while on campaigns in foreign lands. Collecting brought prestige and power, not to mention wealth and status. At what moment the mere accumulating of things turned toward specifically seeking to learn about the cultures who produced the objects is an inquiry difficult to discern looking far back into the distant past. There are inklings of that inquisitiveness during the early 1st millennium BCE. Cataloguing and inventorying the amassed collections necessitated the inclusion of images to facilitate trading items or to show off the best stuff to friends, colleagues, and rivals. Thus, the visualization of collected items became important when the collection became more public. Over time, the more public the collections became, the more illustrations were deemed essential, as for selling, teaching, or publishing.
Collecting, visualizations, and looking backwards have long been associated with antiquarian tendencies. The discipline of (modern) archaeology has been, also, very generally defined as the study of the physical artifactual remains of human existence. So, is it also all about finding and collecting old stuff? Or, can we set it apart as a profession by presuming that it is more about trying to figure out how peoples of the distant past interacted, lived in the spaces we uncover, and coped with the kinds of daily dilemmas that we still deal with today (through analysis of the tangible remains they left behind)? If it is about understanding ancient cultures, then archaeologists must still come to grips with all the artifacts (tools, pots, coins, hearths, sculpture, rooms, buildings, and settlements) that survive from those ancient peoples. Archaeologists’ responsibilities lie well beyond just collecting things and include documentation, analysis, research, teaching, and publishing in order to pass along their evidence, hypotheses, and conclusions to colleagues, students, and the general public. To help accomplish those goals, archaeologists rely on images of their fieldwork, finds, and investigative results. The types of images chosen both reflect the nature of the discipline at the time and adhere to contemporary technologies and standards.
Though it is a fine distinction, a discipline of scientific archaeology perhaps becomes distinct from antiquarianism or prestige collecting when actions go beyond gathering and display and instead encompass empirical evidence-backed inquiries about the lives, settlements, and cultures of the people responsible for the objects.
Though understanding the distant past of those people is not easy, we have ways to partially overcome that and provide scholars, students, and the general public with a near-first-person experience of any moment in history—to see ancient places from the point of view of the original inhabitants. We can build that virtual time machine and travel back to move through and thus better know the past, which may even help us craft a better (more tolerant) future. Such an opportunity alone should warrant discipline-shifting action on the part of the great thinkers of our time, or, at least, by historians, schoolteachers, and museum personnel. Yet, despite a quarter century of demonstrable benefits across domains, new media technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and related interactive computer-graphics technologies (that underlie digital time travel) have been underutilized not only by all manner of archaeologists, in their quest to more accurately interpret artifacts, architecture, and cultural change, but also by educators in their quest to more actively engage knowledge-hungry students and globally dispersed colleagues.
Lush, detailed, accurate, and precise depictions of ancient settlements are not eye candy, not mere pretty pictures of the past (as photographs were, and digital reconstructions still are, too often categorized). Instead, interactive 3D digital reconstructions are visualizations crucial to truly grasping the complexities of (diachronic and synchronic) culture change by allowing us to witness and study the people, events, and cities of the past as if we were actually there, looking through the eyes of those who lived that past and constructed those built environments.
Architecture both determines behavior and is created based on behaviors that reflect cultural conventions. Therefore, studying ancient built environments becomes very important for understanding the past, and how we visualize ancient architecture influences our study of it. Plans, sections, and elevations have been the traditional modes of visually representing architecture (and artifacts) for millennia (Figure 2).
The relevance of those image types was reiterated during the Renaissance when both treatises about architecture and a renewed interest in the ancient world blossomed. A comfortably conservative continuity in the history of the discipline (which persists in classrooms and fieldwork today) has dampened archaeologists’ inclinations to accept new image types and media to document, record, research, and disseminate their findings about the past. When scientific archaeology was being codified during the 19th century, it coincided with Classical revival styles in contemporary architecture which in turn relied upon the plans, sections, and elevations of ancient buildings published by antiquarian travelers around the ancient world. Since many of the key early archaeologists were themselves trained as architects, it is natural to see how the sacred triad of drawings became embedded in their work and persisted for so long. Those three image modes, used for millennia and honed for the architecture profession, limit the way we see the past. Yet, plan-section-elevation continues to be unquestionably repeated by archaeologists for illustrating finds during excavation, for teaching, display, and publication despite numerous alternative and perhaps more illuminating visualization types.
Also, during the 19th century, the introduction of photography into archaeology (much like the introduction of interactive 3D computer graphics into the field in the late 20th century) offered unprecedented ways to capture and investigate the remains of ancient civilizations (Figure 3).
There are many parallels between the trajectory of integration of photography (from the early 19th century into the mid-20th century) and of 3D computer modeling (from the late 20th century into the early 21st century) into archaeological fieldwork and publication. The simultaneous (and often mutually reinforcing) rise of photography and archaeology during the early decades of the 19th century encompass many events and trends that interwove and continue today to define image-capture methods during fieldwork (whether for survey, travel, or excavation). Comments about the limitations and promised advantages of photography for all aspects of archaeology by early adopters and antiquarian travelers are echoed in nearly exactly the same words used regarding virtual heritage techniques. And both image modes found only gradual acceptance into the discipline. It took nearly 150 years before practical standards for using photography in archaeology became widely accepted turning photography into the unquestioned image-capture, documentation, and publication technique. Despite established advantages, the same has not yet happened with interactive 3D computer graphics, despite nearly 50 years of benefits to other related disciplines. The arc from introduction toward eventual inclusion of interactive 3D computer modeling into all aspects of archaeology is a narrative still unfolding but looking back over its first 30 years provides some analogies with how photography was absorbed into the discipline and may provide additional clues to why it is taking so long for archaeologists (and museums and teachers) to adopt the exciting digital means of immersing oneself in the past. Still lacking for computer graphics are both a firm and favorable pronouncement by a respected member of the community and dramatic changes to publishing techniques and venues to allow for the inclusion of virtual worlds.
There are many examples that demonstrate when a new visually based technology emerges to replace an older one, there is a certain user-approval curve until the new technology finds its own visual vocabulary. Until that happens, dependence on the image norms of the previous technology helps ease the newer mode toward wider acceptance. We may still be in that transition period whereby interactive 3D computer graphics seek their own identity, distinct from hand-drawing, drafting, and rendering. Many types of new and not-so-new technologies are vying for archaeology’s attention, most of which have been in use by virtual heritage practitioners since the early 1990s, but many more are emerging all the time. Archaeology has a long tradition of absorbing other discipline’s approaches and tools into its own analytical processes (e.g., statistics, C14 dating, LiDAR, GIS, and photogrammetry). Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, generative AI, and high-end 3D modeling programs have yet to fully undergo similar assimilation. They offer fieldworkers the ability to move beyond collecting things toward using those found objects to re-create an accurate, precise, detailed, and vibrant past complete with intelligent digital characters each of whom could answer questions posed to them by virtual visitors so that archaeologists could test all kinds of new and much more complex hypotheses than ever before about settlement growth, building function and decay, and object use.
These new interactive pasts can be experienced through online collaborative portals. Once features like immersive social media discussions, real-time excavation databases, and globally accessible first-person digital learning modules are added, an entirely new discipline of archaeology begins to emerge. Birthing a new discipline today is not unlike what happened in the mid-19th century after the advent of photography. Given what could be accomplished today, with technologies both in existence and on the horizon, the final chapter of From Photography to 3D Models and Beyond: visualizations in archaeology lays out envelope-pushing ideas about how to improve archaeological fieldwork, teaching, and data dissemination, as I extrapolate from the trends and history outlined in earlier chapters (Fig. 4).
If archaeology is really not just about collecting old things, but more about learning how ancient peoples lived, how the spaces and objects found were used, and how history unfolded, then it would seem in its best interest to utilize visualization tools that help achieve those goals as accurately as possible. How the history of architectural visualizations in archaeology have conditioned and pigeonholed how the profession works today and why the discipline has yet to fully embrace new interactive digital technologies are themes explored in my book.
Thus, yes, we can debate philosophy with Plato, walk around the dusty streets of old Babylon, watch 1000s of perfectly cut stones become an immense pyramid, and conduct business with a vendor in an ancient marketplace. Archaeologists (and teachers, and museum outreach program coordinators, and directors of archaeological site visitors’ centers) have the tools today to make that happen, to test their hypotheses about how the past worked, and ask new and previously unimagined questions about history, cultural development, settlement growth, and architectural change. Our understanding of the past is not conditioned by the questions we ask but by the visualizations chosen to illustrate the answers.
Sincerest thanks to Donald H. Sanders for providing this post for the Archaeopress Blog. Full details of Donald’s book can be found below.
If you would like to contribute an article to the Archaeopress Blog, please contact info@archaeopress.com.
This book explores the history of visual technology and archaeology and outlines how the introduction of interactive 3D computer modelling to the discipline parallels very closely the earlier integration of photography into archaeological fieldwork.
Paperback: £36.00 | PDF eBook: £16.00
