A Serious Game: Teaching Key Archaeological Lessons with Augmented and Virtual Reality

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While archaeologists are quite good at communicating to each other through various professional outlets, we have not been particularly good at conveying our core findings and lessons for wider audiences. This seems particularly true in the Midwest United States. While there are likely many reasons for this, a key one seems to be the low visibility of the remains of ancient sites in the region in contrast to places like the US Southwest. Here we attempt to remedy this problem by presenting a project that is using immersive digital methods to explore the remains of a low visibility archaeological site in Ohio. Our approach uses Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) to accomplish several things. Foremost, these tools have been very successful for increasing visibility of what the site contains and does so in a way as to not further damage the resource. However, we are also utilizing this technology to facilitate remote access to the site and to help the public understand what we have found through excavation, where archaeological photos are used along with three-dimensional objects that can be examined in the context in which they were discovered.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36407.0