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Cyber-archaeology

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

State of Knowledge

Introduction

As it currently stands, cyber-archaeology can essentially be divided into two schools of thought. Cyber-archaeology was first brought into the archaeological discourse following a meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group in 2009 which evaluated cyber-archaeology and its theoretical underpinning as a tool for archaeological research, culminating in several publications on the topic (Forte 2010, 2011 and citations there within) (Cyber-archaeology emerged in the 1990s in communications and anthropology to investigate virtual communities and online behavior (“the systematic exploration of cyberspace”) – in other words, an “archaeology” of the cyber rather than the application of cyber-tools within archaeology (Jones 1997; Escobar et al. 1994).). Growing out of virtual archaeology (Forte and Siliotti 1997), this cyber-archaeology focused primarily on simulating “a potential past” in a 3-D “cyber-environment” (Forte 2011). In other words, cyber-archaeology...

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Levy, T.E., Liss, B. (2020). Cyber-archaeology. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_3203

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