Revealing Hidden Histories with Modern Technology : Archaeological Information Systems and Geolocalization

Abstract

It has been long since it was enough for museums to be simply repositories of objects and hubs of research and knowledge. Public education and sharing of knowledge has always been part of museum ideology but today many museums are striving to engage and enthral their audiences in a world filled with pastime entertainment. Nonetheless, this challenge is not novel but one of the fundamental questions of museum pedagogy: How to present past and distant cultures as lived histories, as lives lived in places and environments now either empty or over taken by new inhabitants and their way of life? How to present the world stored inside the museum as interconnected with the living, changing everyday world outside? In archaeology you can sense the history of an object. After digging carefully an ancient house takes shape and there near the entrance is a loom weight. Maybe discarded in favour of a prettier one, or one with a more suitable weight. On the excavation in the middle of the remains of ancient buildings history becomes almost tangible. Who lived here? Who decided to discard the weight? The problem is, how to transfer this sense of connection and of real life in past ages into a museum? How to take the museum out of the building and to integrate knowledge of the past in the places where history happened? The purpose of this paper is to present solutions to these questions using modern technology to bring information back to the public domain. The presented methods include usage of 3D-technology and augmented reality with geolocalized information in the spirit of geocaching.