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Researchers have been applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to examine the roles of visibility and movement in archaeological landscapes around the world. However, few studies have investigated the role sound potentially played in structuring experience in ancient cities. To begin to fill this gap, this paper builds on our initial investigations to develop new geospatial and virtual reality (VR) methods to examine ancient acoustics. For the ancient Maya, sight and sound worked in concert to create synesthetic experiences that influenced daily life and shaped society. To explore this interaction, we apply a combination of GIS modeling: viewshed analysis, soundshed analysis, and an Urban Digital Elevation Model (Urban DEM) generated from airborne LiDAR and 3D modeling data. This approach provides an opportunity to perform computational analysis on a simulated ancient landscape rather than the contemporary landscape. We then take these GIS-derived computational data into a VR environment to combine sound and vision to illustrate the complementary roles of visual and auditory experience at ancient Copan.
CAA: Digital Archaeologies, Material Worlds (Past and Present)
Modelling acoustics in ancient Maya cities: Moving towards a synesthetic experience using GIS & 3D Simulation2020 •
Archaeological analyses have successfully employed 2D and 3D tools to measure vision and movement within cityscapes; however, built environments are often designed to invoke synesthetic experiences. GIS and Virtual Reality (VR) now enable archaeologists to also measure the acous-tics of ancient spaces. To move toward an understanding of synesthetic experience in ancient Maya cities, we employ GIS and 3D modelling to measure sound propagation and reverberation using the main civic-ceremonial complex in ancient Copán as a case study. For the ancient Maya, sight and sound worked in concert to create ritually-charged atmospheres and architecture served to shape these experiences. Together with archaeological , iconographic, and epigraphic data, acoustic measures help us to (1) examine potential locations of ritual performance and (2) determine spatial placement and capacity of participants in these events. We use an immersive VR headset (Oculus Rift) to integrate vision with spatial sound and sight to facilitate an embodied experience.
Capturing the Senses
Multisensory Experiences in Archaeological Landscapes—Sound, Vision, and Movement in GIS and Virtual Reality2023 •
Archaeologists are employing a variety of digital tools to develop new methodological frameworks that combine computational and experiential approaches which is leading to new multisensory research. In this article, we explore vision, sound, and movement at the ancient Maya city of Copan from a multisensory and multiscalar perspective bridging concepts and approaches from different archaeological paradigms. Our methods and interpretations employ theory-inspired variables from proxemics and semiotics to develop a methodological framework that combines computation with sensory perception. Using GIS, 3D, and acoustic tools we create multisensory experiences in VR with spatial sound using an immersive headset (Oculus Rift) and touch controllers (for movement). The case study simulates the late eighth and early ninth-century landscape of the ancient Maya city of Copan to investigate the role of landscape in facilitate movement, send messages, influence social interaction, and structure cultural events. We perform two simulations to begin to study the impact of vegetation on viewsheds and soundsheds of a stela at ancient Copan. Our objectives are twofold: (1) design and test steps towards developing a GIS computational approach to analyse the impact of vegetation within urban agrarian landscapes on viewsheds and soundsheds and (2) explore cultural significance of Stela 12, and more generally the role of synesthetic experience in ancient Maya society using a multisensory approach that incorporates GIS and VR.
Recent methodological developments in archaeology center on reconstructing the lived experiences of people. However, these efforts, which focus on viewsheds and movement, tend to ignore another sense which played an important role in how people observed and navigated the wider, physical world: that of sound. While the topic of sound has been discussed within phenomenological theory, and has been investigated at the site level through the growing study of archaeoacoustics, landscape level applications have been limited. Sound is governed by physical laws that are as applicable to past societies as they are today. We present a GIS tool developed over the past two years that allows us to model the presence and propagation of culturally significant sounds. With it, we investigate the interaudibility present within the built landscape of Chaco Canyon. This tool allows us to illustrate how events at shrines, stone circles, isolated kivas, and great houses may have been heard at other locations, and explore the relationship between sound, ritual, and performance space. Not only have the modeling results and outputs produced by this tool begun to shape hypotheses, but they are guiding the development of subsequent GIS tools within an archaeoacoustics Sound Analysis Toolbox.
2022 •
This research presents the development and critical assessment of an Archaeoacoustics Toolbox for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology written in the Python programming language, and applies this methodology to cross cultural case studies exploring the importance of soundsheds in an anthropological-archaeological context. As counterpoint to a common critique of experiential theoretical approaches the Soundshed Analysis and Soundshed Analysis-Variable Cover tools provide a replicable means of modeling baseline estimates of the experience of sound. Testing against modern acoustical studies establishing scientific accuracy, and explanations of the sound physics calculations performed by the tools are provided. The tools are then applied to case studies situated in Ancestral Puebloan sites within Chaco Canyon; the Classic Period Maya Kingdom of Copan; and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland to explore a variety of modeling techniques and culturally-derived inputs. In addition to demonstrating the use of the Archaeoacoustics Toolbox, each of the case studies represents an individual contribution to understanding the importance of what was heard in the past. By incorporating a consideration of landscape acoustics, archaeologists can more fully understand the embodied experience explored through phenomenological, perceptive, and performance-based approaches. A GIS approach to landscape scale archaeoacoustics provides a contextualizing framework by which researchers can approach auditory hypotheses, explore embodied experience, and listen to what the past is telling us.
During the past few decades, researchers have developed methodologies for understanding how past people have experienced their wider world. The majority of these reconstructions focused upon viewsheds and movement, illustrating how individuals visually observed their environment and navigated through it. However, these reconstructions have tended to ignore another sense which played a major role in how people experienced the wider, physical world: that of sound. While the topic of sound has been discussed within phenomenology at the theoretical level, and has been approached at the site level through the growing study of “acoustic archaeology,” it has not seen much practical application at the landscape level. This multimedia presentation illustrates how GIS technology can be utilized to develop soundscapes, exploring how people heard their wider surroundings, as well as saw them.
Self-published MSc thesis
Developing an archaeological method for authoring sound in a 4D space (2001)2001 •
The ambition to create immersive audio-augmented environments raises problematic issues of time in a spatial environment, highlighting the disparity between temporally framed sound and interactive agency. Initial research into interactive virtual environments reveals that the user creates their own individual narrative as a result of their movement through the space, accumulating fragments of narrative to create meaning. Such a process suggests a parallel to the actions of the archaeologist: charting and gathering items of interest from an excavation, to create an interpretation of history or agency at the site. This thesis identifies archaeological stratigraphy as a practice that records complex spacio-temporal paradigms, and explores its relevance as a methodology to assist sound design in a 4D environmental space. Based upon the premise that the author of a time-based soundscape creates a database of narrative fragments and clues for the user to find, the paper proposes a distinct design process that reverses the excavation procedure, and re-imagines stratigraphical layers as successive phases of sound in the present tense. The Unreal 3D engine and editor are chosen as a test environment. Several multi-functional classes are designed and programmed using UnrealScript - similar to a combination of Java and C++. These classes offer a variety of options for playing sounds, manage the passage of phases, and allow for interactive agency. Both theory and code are applied to construct a creative virtual environment, illustrating the arrangement of consecutive and consequential sounds into data-lists. Ultimately this 'archive' is placed within the Editor environment, to create an experimental soundscape. Experience of production infers that computer-generated stratigraphical sequences are a useful step towards flexible creation and visualisation of relativity between units of narrative content. Likewise the multi-functional classes fulfill the purpose of translating these relations in the terms of agency, although 'real' time remains to be addressed satisfactorily. It is recognised that further temporal relations have to be identified beyond the present approach that accounts for sounds two nodes of existence – the beginning and the end. The lack of malleability of the record during run-time, indicates next step research is necessary to consider programmable behaviours or AI attributed to the sound actor, and how such features would develop narrative potential. However, the overriding opinion gathered from the investigation is that although the metaphor of archaeological record should be treated as a state of transference and modification, rather than empirical and static, it represents a structure of narrative potential that can be released by the interactor's agency.
For several decades, Geographic Information Systems (GISs) have held center stage in archaeological studies of ancient landscapes. Recently, three-dimensional (3D) technologies such as airborne LiDAR and aerial photogrammetry are allowing us to acquire inordinate amounts of georeferenced 3D data to locate, map, and visualize archaeological sites within their surrounding landscapes. GIS offers locational precision, data overlay, and complex spatial analysis. Three-dimensionality adds a ground-based perspective lacking in two-dimensional GIS maps to provide archaeologists a sense of mass and space more closely attuned with human perception. This article uses comparative and iterative approaches ‘tacking back and forth’ between GIS and 3D visualization to explore the role of visibility in conveying sociopolitical and ideological messages at ancient Copan—today a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Honduras. A two-prong approach comprising computational and experiential components explores the potential role of visibility in sending messages that participate in the shaping of social interaction on a daily basis. The organization of built forms within the natural landscape created spatial configurations that sent visual messages targeting specific different groups, subsequently influencing how people negotiated their physical surroundings and the frequency and intensity of social interactions. The ancient Maya belief that sight played a key role in structuring everyday experiences because it triggered perception in the other senses thus serves to bridge the computational and experiential results in this case study.
2019 •
The creation of digital 3D models for cultural heritage is commonplace. With the advent of efficient and cost effective technologies archaeologists are making a plethora of digital assets. This paper evaluates the identity of 3D digital assets and explores how to enhance or expand that identity by integrating photogrammetric models into VR. We propose that when a digital object acquires spatial context from its virtual surroundings, it gains an identity in relation to that virtual space, the same way that embedding the object with metadata gives it a specific identity through its relationship to other information. We explore this concept by integrating reality-based photogrammetric models with hypothetical 3D reconstructions in VR to bring together “realism” and “reality” to help users form a spatial identity for the objects they are viewing and pursue a more interactive experience with both the embedded models and pursue new lines of archaeological inquiry. Keywords—virtual reality...
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