THE FUTURE OF ARCHAEOLOGY IS DIGITAL
Extent Heritage Senior Associate Brian Shanahan may have a background as a medievalist, but he has built his archaeological career on the possibilities of digital technology.
Growing up in Ireland, Brian Shanahan was surrounded by castles. “All my early memories are of visiting family all over the country, and you’d inevitably end up clamouring over the ruins of a castle together,” he says. “So it’s always been deeply ingrained in me, the physical presence of the past. You want to live it, to touch it, to be so immersed in it you lose your sense of time and place.”
Brian says the digital realm is increasingly important in how archaeologists understand sites and it is a new medium for engaging with the past. Archaeologists still rely on measured scale drawings, tracing, inking, stippling, that whole manual artistic process. However, Brian’s specialist skills in survey, geospatial technologies and digital heritage are vital to how he understands, maps, and communicates the past.
As a medievalist, an interest in digital technology might seem incongruous to some. Brian disagrees.
“It actually fits very well,” he says. “The idealised view of archaeologists is that we’re fuddy-duddies, sheltered under a tower of dusty books. There’s an element of truth to that, but I’ve been working in archaeology for over two decades, and I’ve observed and participated in a lot of changes.”
But the principles are the same. It’s an accessible doorway to the past, or an immersive recreation of it. As far back as 2003, when Brian was the Assistant Director of the Medieval Rural Settlement Project in Ireland, he worked with geospatial experts pushing innovative ways of recording the past.
“Initially I saw it as just another practical tool,” says Brian. “But more recently I think the possibilities of virtual heritage are huge.”
Brian cites two areas where digital technology is changing the game. Firstly there’s the practical use for archaeologists in the field. “You can create a high fidelity record of the things you’re excavating, putting all the data into a virtual sandbox and seeing things you wouldn’t otherwise see,” says Brian. “You can aggregate elements of an excavation from months apart, or recorded in historical data centuries apart.”
The second—and most exciting—possibility is recreating a lost world. The concept of digital twins—a virtual recreation of a space using real-time data—is new to archaeology, but the potential is vast. “You could do anything from recreating a building to an entire city,” says Brian. “That’s a paradigm shift. Archaeology will move that way.”
Now, Brian is searching for new ways to utilise the gigabytes of data archived on old hard drives from decades of archaeological digs. What secrets might this data hold?
Brian has been using existing data to digitally reconstruct several sites, such as an early medieval Irish timber church, and historic Lambies Well in Berrima, NSW. He’s used photogrammetry technology to scan an Iron Age decorated stone and recreated the long-faded engravings. And he’s even used video game software (Unreal Engine) to create immersive environments. Users can walk around a digitally recreated environment like they might in a video game, or in Google Street View.
Covid, he says, has also changed our openness to digital technologies. “I noticed museums and cultural institutions really started embracing digital heritage as a means of making environments more accessible,” says Brian.
“Everyone was compartmentalised, but the digital environment provided emotional release. The infrastructure is there to create this stuff, and the appetite.”
There are challenges ahead, particularly how to use and store all the additional data being recorded. “You’ve got a lot more information to play with, but the challenge is how to use it to produce something meaningful.”
But the possibilities remain great. “It feels like a paradigm shift,” says Brian. “We’re still only scraping the surface.”