A manufactured past: virtual reality in archaeology

Abstract

Virtual reality and visualisation technologies developed over the past thirty years have been readily accessible to the archaeological community since the mid 1990s. Despite the high profile of virtual archaeology (Reilly 1991) both within the media and professional archaeology it has not been taken on board as a generally useful and standard technique by archaeologists. In this article we wish to discuss the technical and other issues which have resulted in a reluctance to adopt virtual archaeology and, more importantly, discuss ways forward that can enable us routinely to benefit from this technology in the diversity of archaeological practice.

Keywords

• archaeology
• VR
• virtual reality
• technology
• technology development
• issues
• reluctance