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Building the Virtual Rosewood Cemetery - Ep 185
319 Plays3 years ago
Dr. Ed Gonzalez-Tennant joins us again in Paul's absence to tell us about the site he's been working on for many years now: The Rosewood Cemetery in Florida. Situated on private land, the Rosewood cemetery is difficult to get to and difficult to maintain. Without some sort of official support it's likely to stay that way. Ed has been documenting the cemetery using a number of recording means. This work has culminated in the virtual Rosewood Cemetery. We talk about that process and the implications regarding virtual archaeology in the near future.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/185
Links
- Building the Virtual Rosewood Cemetery
- Integrating Documentary and Archaeological Data in the Rosewood Cemetery
- The Virtual Rosewood Cemetery on Sketchfab
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Setup
00:00:00
Speaker
While you're listening, go to archpodnet.com slash members and support our efforts. Let's get to the show. You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 185. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my guest co-host, Ed Gonzalez-Tenant. Today we talk about his efforts to represent an historic cemetery virtually. Also, my mic didn't pick up for the entire episode, so apologies for that and my headphone mic quality, and I'll be looking for a new job, but not as a podcast engineer. Let's get to it.
00:00:39
Speaker
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the Archiotech podcast. Paul is still gallivanting around Saudi Arabia. He's actually there was a mix up in his airline tickets and he was almost coming back in like October. But luckily he's not. He's coming back in a couple of weeks. So I think he'll be on the next recording. We'll see. But either way, today we have back on as our special guest host, Ed Gonzales, 10. Ed, how's it going? Great. How are you doing?
00:01:05
Speaker
Good, good. Yeah, we're up in Calgary, Canada right now. We came up here just because it filled our schedule. We, like, Canada thought it'd be cooler in the United States. And then, you know, we're at the tail end of, like, a heat wave in British Columbia and Alberta, which is crazy.
Virtual Reality in Archaeology
00:01:20
Speaker
But the heat wave only hit, like, low 90s. So that's good. Not like some parts of the United States, which are way worse. Yeah. Well, yeah. Greetings from the Rio Grande Valley, where it is literally 100 degrees right now.
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. That's no good for anybody. Speaking of, well, not really speaking of, but you know, hot things, virtual stuff, right? In fact, I just saw, and we haven't watched it yet. We're just like trolling HBO max last night. Just seeing what else out there was new. And there's a movie called, it's a documentary actually called we met in virtual reality. And it just looking at the trailer, you know, it's some people who are definitely
00:02:03
Speaker
a little bit extra when it comes to that stuff. And some of them are trying to maintain long-term relationships. Some of them are finding new relationships. It was all about virtual relationships because it's called We Met in Virtual Reality. But the point is, some of the people in there are spending every waking moment that they possibly can in virtual reality. They're living their lives there. They're teaching classes there. They're doing things. So virtual reality is a
00:02:27
Speaker
is a thing that obviously it's a niche thing right now for a lot of people it's not a common part of people's everyday lives when they think about visiting a place they think about visiting it in reality you know you might look at some pictures first you might look at instagram you might look at something like that to kind of prep yourself
00:02:43
Speaker
But it's always, let's go there. But to be honest, that's not always great for archaeology. It's not always great for preservation. And it's not always great for carbon footprints. You know, you got to fly somewhere, you have to drive somewhere. There's crowds of people. We've been in Banff National Park for the last week. And my God, the number of people that are just up there, there's a lake that you can go watch the sunrise over near Lake Louise. But you have to literally get in the parking lot at three o'clock in the morning, because by 3.30, four o'clock, it's full and they close it. Because people are waiting for this
00:03:13
Speaker
time to come up. Yeah, it's nuts. It's absolutely nuts. So along those lines, let's talk about creating a virtual cemetery. And why are we? Why are we talking about this? So I also want to say I did actually see that same documentary you're talking about at the
00:03:31
Speaker
What was it? The some hotel I was staying at last week in Rosenberg, Texas, outside of Houston. Nice. So anybody who's like listening to this podcast and had experience with Second Life, this documentary is about VR chat. But it feels like in some ways, 10 years ago, watching a documentary about
00:03:52
Speaker
Second life or reading right coming of age in second life. So I thought it was pretty cool You know, I mean to use the the language of the Utes today it was a bit cringe in places but I also felt a lot of sincerity on the part of People they were were engaging with and I thought that was really cool. There is actually I watched this a few years ago I don't know exactly when it came out, but I know I saw it probably two three years ago at the very least and
00:04:20
Speaker
a documentary about Second Life. It was literally the same thing as this, except it was Second Life. And it was focused around a few people that developed a relationship and actually potentially even got married in Second
Virtual Representation and Cultural Preservation
00:04:33
Speaker
Life. And then there was a little bit of aftermath, too, when some of these people finally met in real life and maybe it didn't quite hold up or whatever. And I think in one case, they were actually
00:04:44
Speaker
in the same house but on different computers at other ends of the house and still like interacting in second life because that's just what they knew once they met in real life or else so to speak. So, you know. I mean, those of us in long-term relationships know they require compromise and if that compromise is requiring a digital intermediary for interaction then you make that compromise I guess.
00:05:13
Speaker
I'll tell you what, man, I live in a 300 square foot house on wheels with an engine. So my wife and I can totally relate. Yeah. She, she says that the only thing that saves our marriage is we both have noise canceling headphones. She's got them on right now. I'm like watching her typing away on her computer in a living room. She has no idea I'm talking about her. So anyway,
00:05:34
Speaker
You know, one of these things, these virtual environments do require, though, why we brought up the virtual cemetery. One of the things I did like about Second Life, I haven't logged in there in a really long time. But one of the things I did like about looking around in there is people had created virtual representations of real things in the world, crazy things like this.
00:05:52
Speaker
you can walk around the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek, but then also stuff like Pompeii and archaeological excavation and certain generic things like that, but then certain real things that people have created that you can go experience. That wasn't very good, and that's no discredit to them. It's just the medium wasn't very good. It wasn't very realistic.
00:06:14
Speaker
but it's getting a lot better with modern VR. I've got an Oculus Quest 2 sitting right next to me, and I use it almost every day for either workout or my home office setup. I don't really use it for VR chat or anything else like that, except I do play golf with one of my colleagues occasionally, and we talk about work on a virtual golf course, which is fun. But aside from that, we need to be able to recreate things in a more realistic way in VR. I think that's what we're going to really focus on today.
00:06:42
Speaker
I'm going to use or talk about cemeteries, particularly the cemetery in Rosewood, Florida, where I've done a lot of my own research in part because, you know, these are places and whether it's VR chat, Second Life, or a whole host of
00:06:57
Speaker
I don't know, spaces or ecosystems where people are delivering virtual content. You know, one of the things that is difficult for a lot of places, particularly those of us who are archaeologists, I think there's kind of two or even twin complications for visiting a site, right? If it's a national park and everybody comes there, you've already talked about the difficulties that we're facing now post COVID.
00:07:23
Speaker
they're being sort of overwhelmed by, particularly I guess during tourist season, but I've heard that about a lot of parks. But what about places where you can't visit, either it's privately owned or it doesn't exist like anthropologists or archaeologists imagined it or know it existed in the past?
00:07:44
Speaker
And so that's one of the things that, for me, bringing together different technologies, remote sensing, geophysics, and 3D and virtual technologies to reconstruct either extant or ruined sites in a way that's immersive, but also intuitively so. That's what I'm really interested in doing. I'm doing it with cemeteries,
00:08:09
Speaker
you know, clearly the one in Rosewood, for those of you who may not know, it's privately owned. And while Florida, the state of Florida has, you know, statutes about, you know, sort of guaranteeing descendants a right to visit those graves, you know, this is clearly an important site, particularly now what it's August of 2022, we're just literally a few months out from the hundredth anniversary of the destruction of that community.
00:08:35
Speaker
This is going to be a site that is going to become, if I had to predict it, this is going to be a site that everybody will be talking about in the coming months. How do we visit that? It's privately owned, the landowner.
00:08:51
Speaker
has always worked with direct descendants to grant them access. But you know, the story of Rosewood is much larger. And many communities, you know, it resonates not just with direct descendants, but African Americans in general. And of course, is
00:09:08
Speaker
is a part of really the fabric of our nation's history in a really bad and ugly way, but we don't want to turn away from that. So how do we make these places accessible? How do we make these places that are part of
00:09:23
Speaker
these sorts of conversations that we need to be having, how can we make them accessible if they don't exist or access to them is controlled? And I think most archaeologists will have worked on a site where this set of concerns is present. And so I don't think we'll necessarily want to talk about, you know, how did you get access to the property? And so, you know, it was a long term process. Anybody who does collaborative or engaged archaeology knows it can take years to
00:09:51
Speaker
to gain access to something, and that's the case here. But I think what's really interesting is the ability of various digital 3D VR tools to combine data sets like photogrammetric models of headstones or tombstones with LIDAR and drone captured photogrammetry. So, you know, other kinds of 3D
00:10:19
Speaker
surfaces representing the ground of the site, bringing those together and delivering that plus ground penetrating radar, field mapping with the total station, right? This sort of like beautiful mix of traditional and emergent technologies within archaeology and then delivering it in a way that basically anybody with a cell phone, a computer or a set of VR goggles can access the site, which is, you know,
00:10:48
Speaker
In this case, like many archaeological sites is controlled. Access is controlled to that site. So we're going to take a break here in a second. But when we come back, I want to talk about some of the some of the other benefits. We kind of alluded to it about virtual reality. And then we'll talk about the cemetery itself and a little bit about how you go about deciding what kind of data in what or what way you need to collect that for the platforms you're
Joining the Community and Learning Opportunities
00:11:13
Speaker
going to put this on. So we'll do that on the other side of the break back in a minute.
00:11:19
Speaker
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00:11:48
Speaker
you
00:11:55
Speaker
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00:12:21
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VR in Archaeological Testing and Content Delivery
00:12:40
Speaker
Welcome back to episode one 85 of the architect podcast. And I'm talking with Ed Gonzales, 10 about creating a virtual cemetery. And, you know, one of the things you, you alluded to in the end of the last segment, there is one of the reasons why, you know, we would do something like this, not only for archeologists to help visualize what's going on, right? But also members of the public can, can visit this kind of thing because you don't want them, you know, trumping around these necessarily any archeological site for that matter.
00:13:08
Speaker
I think another aspect of this is also, and maybe with the cemetery, maybe not, but definitely other archaeological sites I can imagine where it is more ruins, it's more ephemeral in what you're actually finding. Our imaginations are full of inaccuracies and bias. So we might be thinking, well, based on the available evidence, this is what I picture this thing looks like. And the more experience you have, the more accurate that picture may be.
00:13:33
Speaker
the ability to articulate those thoughts and data into something in a virtual reality environment that you can literally step into in VR and then walk around and look, you can actually test assumptions and say, this actually doesn't make any sense.
00:13:50
Speaker
in the right mind would have set something up this way. That doesn't mean they didn't do it, but it might help you test out those kinds of assumptions. I think from a pure research standpoint, not just public engagement, but a pure research standpoint, it might be helpful to start thinking virtual reality. It would be great if we had easier tools to be able to create these environments, but an easier way to create these environments so we can just
00:14:15
Speaker
Add that to our toolkit for understanding and how that works. And then if it all works out, you know, open it up to members of the public, put it on some sort of virtual world, so to speak, and let other people visit it. So.
00:14:28
Speaker
Along those lines, you mentioned some of the tools you were using to sort of create this cemetery in a virtual way. How did you decide to use what you're using? Are you starting with a virtual endpoint and you know what it takes to create that? Do you have something in mind, a platform or a software or something like that? And you know what that requires and you're kind of reverse engineering it from there in order to provide the data for that or how does that work?
00:14:51
Speaker
So I think where I'm at now is there, right? Like moving forward, new projects, new sites. I have this endpoint in mind and I know sort of the steps that I would take to arrive there.
00:15:06
Speaker
But again, talking about the Virtual Rosewood Cemetery, work has been going on there since 2012, 2013, and initially was very, very traditional work. Let's map the site. Let's dream about
00:15:24
Speaker
doing ground-penetrating radar survey to locate unmarked burials. Let's see what the documentary record has. And so for the most part, the research there began like a lot of archaeological projects did. Over time, new concerns emerged for me as well as a growing experience or familiarity with different digital and virtual technologies that
00:15:52
Speaker
I started to imagine, okay, so, you know, as archaeologists, we were able to map things, you know, this historic cemetery in the southern US, you know, it's a sandy area, there are depressions, you know, people who visited historic graveyards know what depressions that are historic graves, but unmarked look like, right. So an experienced researcher, you know, whether that means like professional
00:16:17
Speaker
or academic or even avocational, a researcher knows what they're looking at. But a lot of people would arrive at a site like this where maybe there's only three or four marked graves. The documentary record records
00:16:33
Speaker
40-something graves, like death certificates, where, you know, how, as an archaeologist, I can start to reconcile that through the results of a ground-penetrating radar survey, field mapping of depressions, the marked, you know, I can bring these different data sets together as an, quote unquote, expert.
00:16:53
Speaker
how would I start to communicate that to the public? And not in a way where I assume they know less, but in a way that I just understand they've had less experience working in these sorts of settings. And that's what really, in the last few years, motivated me to start thinking, well, how would I combine
00:17:13
Speaker
you know, these different forms of archaeological data that archaeologists, right, we work with sort of natively after after a time, you know, we understand how to combine field mapping data, and even, you know, light our data of the site and the results of ground trading radar survey, how would I create something the public would
00:17:35
Speaker
not just find intuitive, but also actually have an interest in exploring. And so I landed on taking a very traditional set of archaeological data and pushing it through a much more digital and virtual workflow with the idea of, hey, there are these tools, sites like Sketchfab, where I can actually deliver really
00:18:05
Speaker
powerful, large virtual data sets that users can then approach and access on their phones, their computers, their goggles, whatever. And it'll deliver natively to those different formats. So whether you have a 2D screen, whether that's your phone or your computer monitor,
00:18:27
Speaker
delivering 3D content or you have something fully immersive like a pair of VR goggles. The great thing about Sketchfab is when you upload your virtual content, your 3D models, it will automatically deliver that 3D data in any of those formats. For me, I have a relatively modest cost annually to have the Sketchfab
00:18:55
Speaker
membership, but for the user, it's absolutely free. There's no cost to the user. And so I started working between, you know, what I think is a very traditional archaeological project in a historic cemetery and moving it into this, you know, I guess now I would say emergent or emerged. I find it hard to say like, oh, yeah, you know, 3D technologies are emerging technology. I mean, they're around. We know about them, right?
00:19:23
Speaker
kind of push that traditional data, like how do I take traditional archaeological data in a GIS and elsewhere and bring it into a 3D model that I can then make interactive. And so Sketchfab offers the delivery solution. We all know how to produce that traditional archaeological data
00:19:46
Speaker
what was really the sort of exploration point was how do I combine this data into a 3D data set that I could then push into Sketchfab. Okay, and Sketchfab would show you really
00:20:03
Speaker
A lot of times what you see in Sketchfab is sometimes, especially in archaeological sites, is what the site looks like now. You're taking these lidar data, photogrammetric data, all this stuff and putting this together and giving a picture of what it looks like now. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on if this were brought into a full virtual reality goggles environment in some sort of universe that exists in virtual reality.
00:20:27
Speaker
not something like Sketchfab where you would basically look one-off at different things, but maybe actually applied to a, you know, to some sort of a landscape. Do you think you would want to represent the cemetery as it is now, given that a lot of historic cemeteries definitely have some degradation and some maintenance issues and some restoration issues, or would you want to show it fully restored?
Ethics and Challenges in Digital Reconstruction
00:20:48
Speaker
Is there ethical concerns around, I guess,
00:20:52
Speaker
altering its natural decay, so to speak. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the the I guess the the tact I took was kind of a mix of those. You know, I'm not guessing at what headstones that might have been there look like. I think we certainly in this site had a lot of ephemeral like wooden headstones and so forth. Like, I think this is a really important question. And I don't think that archaeologists
00:21:18
Speaker
well, most archaeologists who are interested in these things are not taking the time to think about this. And I think conversations with descendants or other stakeholder communities is important in that regard, like what value would you get from this? And I guess if the goal is to create, like with the virtual Rosewood Cemetery,
00:21:44
Speaker
There's no point in really recreating how it looks now. There's only one visible headstone. It's overrun by various vegetation. The maintenance of the site probably could, I don't know, improve. But this is in the middle of nowhere. The person who owns it doesn't live on the property. They live some distance away from it. There are legitimate reasons why it's in the state it's in.
00:22:12
Speaker
I think each site would be different. A site that's ruined today, showing the ruined state, I think could have value. Obviously showing the present condition of a site is much easier. You can do laser scanning or photogrammetry or whatever.
00:22:29
Speaker
done. There's not a lot of editing. There's very little conjecture, if any, involved. And so approaching a site in that way is much easier. If you want to represent a site as it existed, you have to develop a whole different toolkit, a whole different set of skills. Because at that point, you're modeling 3D objects
00:22:52
Speaker
They may be based on photographs, architectural drawings, or what have you, but they're not easily recordable with technologies today. You have to take a step into a whole different set of skills and a whole different sort of conjectural landscape. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah.
00:23:11
Speaker
All right, well, let's take our final break and then come back and certainly not wrap up this discussion, but we'll continue it because there's a lot to talk about. But we'll do that on the other side of the break, back in a minute.
00:23:26
Speaker
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00:24:09
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00:24:29
Speaker
Welcome back to the final segment of episode 185 of the architect podcast. And we're talking about creating a virtual cemetery. So we've, we've talked about, you know, some of the techniques you've used and some of the things you've done so far, what remains to be done. And I think along the lines of that question is what could you do if money and time were no object?
00:24:50
Speaker
Like, what would you like? You know, that's always a fun question to ask because you never know. You never know what's going to come down the line. But so, so what, what's left that, that you can actually do right now in, in order to, to really, I guess, finish
00:25:05
Speaker
you know, where you started and then we'll talk about where you would go, you know, given the golden check. Well, I think at this point, you know, you know, we have a finished or I have a finished 3D virtual immersive interactive model of the Rosewood Cemetery. So a lot of ways I think we've we've done what we can do with that site. I mean, now, you know, when I say that it's it's a very small site, right? You're totally
00:25:35
Speaker
a few dozen burials, most of which are unmarked, but revealed through ground penetrating radar. The number of visible graves, marked graves, and GPR anomalies, it roughly corresponds to the Florida certificates of death.
00:25:52
Speaker
that we can find in the archives. We have a good correspondence between these documentary and archaeological data, which as a historical archaeologist, I love that. That correspondence is beautiful in a lot of ways. So in regards with that project, I feel like I've sort of hit what I needed to. I don't know what the future of access to that property looks like.
00:26:17
Speaker
Will it be converted into some sort of public lands? Will it be purchased by the state?
00:26:24
Speaker
Will it be purchased by a nonprofit? Will the landowner open it? I don't know. And I can't speak for any of the parties that might be involved in that. But I think what's interesting is even if that would happen, and I think this is where it gets into the golden ticket question, even if that were to happen, the immediate area that I'm reconstructing with that is a very small area. It's a few tens of meters by a few tens of meters.
00:26:53
Speaker
In that respect, it's kind of, I don't want to say it's easy, right? There's all of these different skills that they brought into, you know, into conversation, but it's not a huge space. It's not a huge number of 3D models. In fact, the vegetation is really the most costly part, trying to represent what the area around the graves looks like in terms of trees and shrubs and so forth.
00:27:19
Speaker
So, you know, in terms of like a learning tool and a finished product, I feel pretty good about where we're at with this. I think, you know, what I need to do, quite frankly, is like academic is do some more writing up about this whole process. I think that that honestly is kind of the missing piece because I think there are a lot of people working in cemeteries who face these challenges.
00:27:44
Speaker
particularly small cemeteries, private cemeteries, family cemeteries. In my new position at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, there's a big push in the surrounding areas and counties.
00:28:00
Speaker
to kind of create a large database of who's buried where. You've got lots of families, lots of communities who are like, I know I have a connection to this area. Find a grave is great, but it's not easy necessarily to find relatives. And even if it is, I don't know what it looks like. So I think there's a lot of
00:28:22
Speaker
sort of local stories that can be told by these things. I think the interactivity, and this is where I think maybe we can like shift into that second question, like embedding additional information, whether that's like oral histories or historic photographs, experimenting with the ways that we would incorporate these other data into a virtual world, into a virtual space, into an interactive and immersive space,
00:28:49
Speaker
I think that's the last sort of step to move into. But of course, you know, anybody who works with archaeology and oral history and the intersection of those two things knows that these are time intensive and often even, you know, sort of resource intensive things to do.
Future Technology and Archaeology
00:29:07
Speaker
And I think there are some models out there, you know, I've even written about this when maybe you move into a certain area.
00:29:15
Speaker
or click on a certain, I don't know, model, click on a certain headstone. Maybe that activates a snippet of somebody's oral history about that individual, right? I mean, there's so many of these possibilities that could take place. And we're talking virtual, but obviously you could shift that into an augmented or mixed reality application as well. So the goal of creating a virtual Rosewood Cemetery has been met. However,
00:29:45
Speaker
there can be so much more than a virtual X site, I think. And I think what's really exciting right now, and I don't want to jump into the like, you have a bucket of money, what can you do? But I think what's really exciting now is bucket of money or not, and I do want to talk about that, but bucket of money or not,
00:30:04
Speaker
There are so many open source tools and, you know, computational power of our cell phones and our laptops is such today that I think a lot of these things are if they're not currently within reach, they're so tantalizingly close. And I think, you know, we've talked the last couple of weeks about this like maker mindset. I mean, I think
00:30:27
Speaker
What's really exciting for students and archaeologists and heritage professionals in general is how do I kind of kit bash my own approach, my own selection of software, my own selection of hardware, my own selection of delivery options? How do I bring that together to serve my interests at this site or the community's interest at that site and so forth? Right. And it's interesting you mentioned being able to click on some of the
00:30:57
Speaker
some of the headstones and maybe see some information about the people's lives that are buried there. And I was thinking from a virtual reality, immersive standpoint, almost a very similar thing. I actually wrote this down as a note during the last segment.
00:31:11
Speaker
I was like, man, it'd be super cool to almost view the headstones and the graves as a door. And you literally like step into whatever world this person lived in. And it would be, some of it would be from historical records, just of what we know, you know, where the people lived. Cause there, there might not be a lot of information about each person that was buried there, but you know, what we do have, we could include in what we don't know. We could, you know, we could estimate based on what we just, what we know of that time period. But you know, another question that's kind of related to all this is.
00:31:42
Speaker
If we, you know, thinking way into the future, because there's going to be long-term repercussions of these virtual representations. Right. And one of the things I'm thinking of that might not be too far as far to the future as we think that was, we think it is like possibly within our lifetimes. You know, you got like a ready player, one scenario where people are living their lives in virtual reality. And, and we have archeological sites represented as accurately as we possibly could within these virtual worlds. Right.
00:32:14
Speaker
because if preservation and education is the key, if it's preserved and people are learning about it in an online environment and that's where they're spending most of their time,
00:32:23
Speaker
What is the ethical consideration around the physical one that remains, you know, should we bulldoze it to put up more server farms for people to be in, you know, virtual reality or, or like, what happens to it? You know what I mean? When nobody's paying attention. Don't worry. Don't worry. We're, you know, we're putting up another Amazon cloud farm, but we've scanned Stonehenge at a one-to-one scale. So you'll be able to visit it anytime the Druids can
00:32:50
Speaker
virtually manifest themselves in, in VR chat. I mean, obviously that's a fascinating question, right? Like, I don't have a definite answer. I mean, I understand any archeologist, particularly those of us or those of you who have worked. I mean, I have, and I know a lot of listeners have worked or do work in cultural resource management, contract archeology, federal agencies.
00:33:16
Speaker
state agencies, whatever that means for you personally or locally. And there's, you know, that constant balancing act which can shift very quickly into triage from development. I mean, I think, you know, what's cool about digital and virtual technologies is it's sort of, it's an extension of what archaeology
00:33:37
Speaker
particularly salvage archaeology, right, has always been. Get the best and largest amount of data in really as quick a way as possible to preserve that information. Well, what if our tools are methodologies? And I think that's really it. I think this is less about, I mean, sure, there will be a time. I remember this in my master's defense at Michigan Tech, right? You know, I have a master's in industrial archaeology.
00:34:06
Speaker
And it's a great school, great program, great folks there. And I was sort of, you know, talking about the defense, which my thesis was very GIS oriented and remote sensing. And I'm like, Oh, you know, at some point, we'll have a little black box, we'll take it out to a site, we'll set it down, and it'll basically record everything.
00:34:25
Speaker
you won't even have to excavate. And certainly I think for a lot of us who enjoy the act of excavation, the act of field work, the camaraderie that comes along with that, also the just natural collective think, hey, we found this. Let's all think about what this means. I think that's a really powerful way to explore the past and history and heritage. I'd hate to see that go away.
00:34:54
Speaker
But on the other hand, you know, what happens when we can do a complete recording, whatever that means. I mean, molecular level, you know, component analysis, what, what, cause you know, I don't know if that'll happen in our lifetime. I think of like Star Trek scanners, you're right. Like from the enterprise. Oh, there's intelligent life here. Whatever that means ever. We define that, which obviously they got schooled on that lesson more than once.
00:35:22
Speaker
But, you know, so like, yeah, getting back to the question, I think as archaeologists and heritage professionals, our goal is to produce the sort of record that could serve a, you know, ready player one, sort of scenario, like, look, this is lost, but we know enough that we can reconstruct it. And now we have the technologies that we can, you know, make it available to people. I've often thought of,
00:35:51
Speaker
There's a part of me that wants to be like a science fiction author, right? And I've often thought of a scenario where an archaeologist, an ethnoarchaeologist uses the technologies that will be available probably within the decade, fully immersive environments. If not self-aware,
00:36:13
Speaker
artificial intelligences, things that are basically indistinguishable from our perspective. And so what happens if we create, you know, a scenario, an island, perhaps we work in the Caribbean, like I have done, and we're interested in what would it be like to do an ethnography with
00:36:32
Speaker
the indigenous population that lived here a thousand years ago. And what if I can use archaeological and ethnographic data to basically generate a group of living individuals in a virtual system and I can go do ethnography as an archaeologist among them.
00:36:49
Speaker
how are you living, how are you exploiting the environment, and so forth, and how is this going to inform my future interpretations? But then, of course, what happens, you know, I feel like this is maybe the next step or two from your question, like, what happens then when we're like, okay, well, the simulation is done, I learned what I needed to do, but there's 500
00:37:10
Speaker
possibly sentient indigenous people living in this simulation. Do I just turn that off? So maybe that's very far in the future. Maybe we never get to a point where you have to ask those questions. But I think asking those sorts of questions, it's just kind of like an issue of scale. Do I protect this one site? I can virtually reconstruct it perfectly.
00:37:36
Speaker
Who am I protecting it for? I mean, obviously, I've sort of beaten around the bush on this, right? As an archaeologist, yeah, I want to protect all the sites. I don't want them to ever go away, but we also recognize that that's just not feasible. I mean, humanity would have to stop, right? We just have to pause.
00:37:54
Speaker
for that to be a reality. And that's not going to happen for better and for worse. So I have no answer. I think the best answer for those of us who consider ourselves digital heritage, digital archeologists is do your best to document as much as possible. And the great thing about that sort of data is we can then access it later.
00:38:18
Speaker
and reconstruct these places, which I think is also cool because people sort of present digital archaeology or virtual archaeology as something brand new. But I think there's this core component to it, what we're talking about now, right? Let's reconstruct a site virtually so people can visit it.
00:38:38
Speaker
I think that that is sort of the public or engaged archaeology extension of what archaeology as a science has always tried to do, preserve the information. And now we just have a way to make that information accessible to a much, much larger audience, not just us and the people who pay for publications. Indeed, indeed. Yeah, and that's, man, it is so many, so many questions because we are on the cusp of
00:39:07
Speaker
really a revolution in outreach and interaction with things, not just for the public, but for scientists as well.
00:39:16
Speaker
when you were talking about studying a virtual people, yeah, I was thinking along the same lines of taking all available data and putting it into, I hate to say the words invoking all the sci-fi craziness, but putting it into like an AI so the AI could infer back with what we know about other cultures and civilizations and what was found in this particular location and essentially build a people.
00:39:40
Speaker
that we're creating this. So then we can go look and see potentially how these things were done based on all the available evidence and other stuff that we know. But like you said, man, that is such a slippery slope because
00:39:52
Speaker
you know, what happens to those quote unquote people, especially if they gain some sort of sentience or something like that. We seem like we're talking way into the future in sci-fi, but this kind of thing like just happens, right? Like all this, at some point we're going to live in a world where sentient artificial life forms, whether they're computer or robotic or whatever, either way, it's the software.
00:40:12
Speaker
where that doesn't exist, and then all of a sudden we're going to live in a world where it does exist. So it's not a thing that's part of our lives until it is. And once it is, it's going to be a game changer. It's going to literally change everything about what we do. And even archaeology, something that
00:40:28
Speaker
some people would say is stuck in the past will be impacted by this crazy future. So anyway, yeah. I mean, I think like a lot of these things, you know, in a university setting, I arrive and I'm working with whatever the GIS program is or department. And they're, they're almost always surprised to see just how involved
00:40:51
Speaker
archaeology is with these technologies. I think it's going to be the same thing with any of these others, you know, even artificial reality. I mean, in some ways, we're just talking about simulation and simulation studies are exploding right now in archaeology. People are simulating all sorts of aspects of the past. So it's only a matter of time before, you know, agent based modeling is, I guess, what I'm talking about. It's only a matter of time before we can
00:41:18
Speaker
quote unquote, program or create or generate very intelligent agents, you know, agents whose intelligence is so deep that maybe for those of us interacting with them, it starts to become indistinguishable from other people. And of course, you know,
00:41:38
Speaker
the Google engineer who swears they have a chat bot that is sentient now and lost their job because of this. I mean, yeah, I don't think this is a question we're going to have to ponder much longer. I mean, yeah, maybe it's years, maybe decades even, but, you know, as a species, this is a, this is a question that is going to be answered for us relatively quickly. Or, you know, I think we disappear, but I'm obviously hopeful that we don't disappear.
00:42:06
Speaker
And hopefully we treat AI or sentient non-corporal intelligences with some semblance of respect. Obviously, the history of humanity shows that's exactly what we do. I would almost judge an AI, essentially an AI, for not immediately destroying us. I would almost judge them for that.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:42:31
Speaker
How intelligent are you, really?
00:42:37
Speaker
Okay. You're a product of human engineering. Exactly. All right, Ed. Well, thanks a lot for this episode and the, and the last couple. So this has been, this has been really great. I don't know if we're going to need you for another one. We'll find out. I think, like I said, I think Paul might be on track to be back for another recording, but who knows.
00:42:56
Speaker
We'll keep you on tap just in case and get some updates on what you're doing. Absolutely. I'm happy to be here and always happy to drop by. Sounds good. All right. Well, thanks, Ed. And thanks, everybody else. And we'll see you in a couple of weeks.
00:43:14
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:43:39
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:44:07
Speaker
This is Chris Webster, founder of the APN and one of the chief editors. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. If you want to keep the conversation going and support us along the way, go to arcpodnet.com slash members. That's arcpodnet.com slash members. And thanks for listening.