Çatalhöyük in Second Life, Fall 2009

Once again Spring has come to Çatalhöyük! We’ve removed all the snow and icicles and the tell is green and grassy. Work has started up again, and we’re lucky enough to have a class dedicated to “Serious Games” working on the site, as well as undergraduate research apprentices through Berkeley’s URAP program.
We have a number [...]

(Re)Building Çatalhöyük: Changing Virtual Reality in Archaeology

I submitted the final version of my Archaeologies journal article today, through their digital editorial manager.  It is a reworked version of a paper I wrote for the World Archaeological Congress last year in Dublin and it will be my first official publication.  Many thanks to Krysta Ryzewski, the editor of the volume, for organizing [...]

Verisimilitude

Y’know, as close as we can get sometimes, it’s just not the same as actually being there.

Rome in Google Earth

I spent the weekend in a particularly brown, cold, and desolate corner of Colorado–pretty far away from the sunny Mediterranean.  Regardless, I spent a bit of time checking out Rome Reborn after Google’s big announcement last week.  Google Earth’s Rome page is a little disppointing, but it contains a brief youtube video and a few [...]

Furnishing the Neolithic, pt 2

I was able to nearly complete the Neolithic house by Cal Day, which was nearly a miracle.  I would still like to add more pottery, obsidian, bucrania, and the like.  I would also like to add embedded links to images of excavated materials like baskets and murals to show what the reconstructions are based on.
I [...]

GET REAL: A Manifesto for Virtual Reality in Archaeology

Submitted to the “Experience, modes of engagement, archaeology” session organized by Krysta Ryzewski, Matt Ratto and Michelle Charest.

Virtual reality has been a “killer app” within the realm of archaeological computing, as evident from the number of books, journals, and conferences dedicated to the subject. Though often presented as a single entity, virtual reality is [...]