Does Virtual Archaeology Exist
Laia Pujol · 2008
The present paper takes Paul Reilly’s article “Towards a Virtual Archaeology” as a starting point to expose a reflection about the epistemological implications of virtual reality for archaeology. In his contribution at CAA90, Reilly talked about “solid modeling” and indicated that this new tool would inevitably push archaeology towards a new scientific stage. After fifteen years of diverse implementations, have we reached this “virtual archaeology” towards which we were moving? Has virtual reality (VR) modified the debate over archaeology’s epistemological foundations? This paper addresses this question, firstly by developing the underlying implications of Reilly’s publication, and secondly by examining the field’s current state of the art applications and vocabulary. This comparison between the potential and the actual uses of virtual reality, especially for dissemination purposes, will demonstrate that archaeology never became “virtual” in the way Reilly expected, because the traditional concept of archaeology was reinforced instead of being transformed by VR technology