The Digital Age of Archaeology, otherwise called Virtual Archaeology, is here. As new technologies are made available to universities, researchers, archaeologists, and historians, the field of archaeology will naturally evolve. As such, many archaeology departments are now using 3D modeling software to decipher ancient worlds. Consequently, they have also gone as far as using computers to recreate the environment and conditions of the past and historic battles.

As radar images and geophysical surveys continue to take over the archaeological world, so does an archaeologist's ability to understand what kind of information can be discovered by using these methods.

Information Courtesy of MNSU

There are four fundamental computer-based applications or program types that are being developed in virtual archaeology as it exists today. 

• Database Management: It is used for the creation, storage and retrieval of data.

• Statistical Analysis of data: This can take the form of traditional statistical archaeological analysis, spreadsheet software programs or managerial database query language programs.
  
•  Image Processing: This allows the researcher to manipulate images in order to visualize data representations in a variety of ways.
  
• Modeling programs: These use the data collected and the images created to model artifact assemblages in a relational manner and to create dynamic virtual realities where one can study the way in which different components of the past may have functioned.

Do any of you use Virtual Archaeology at your college? If you do, tell us about it.

Shot at the Bristol University in June 2010, Dr. Alistair Pike and Professor Harald Meller lecture on the archaeological findings of  Eadgyth (Edith).

It was this tomb that was opened by German archaeologists in 2008, a tomb long expected to be empty...But instead it contained a lead box carrying the inscription "EDIT REGINE CINERES HIC SARCOPHAGVS HABET..."

Read the entire blog post about the Saxon Queen Eadgyth on Heritage Key