Archaeology and computers: perspectives of the 21st century

Archaeological computing is a new and evolving discipline which set its roots in the 1950s and went on to promote the development of formalised procedures to represent, process and communicate data. In the course of its unceasing development, archaeological computing has introduced alternative paths of scientific inquiry, with a profound impact on traditional research methods. In the 21st century, computer applications overcome the traditional static procedure of data recording and querying, in order to build a dynamic model which can describe the complexity of an archaeological context in all its aspects. New perspectives, favoured by Information and Communication Technologies, aim at developing methods designed to represent, process and transmit digital information. From statistical analyses to Geographical Information Systems, from multimedia systems to Virtual Reality techniques, computer science constitutes an integrated platform capable of managing methods proper to different disciplines, contributing to the reconstruction of the events that led to the stratification of the past. New means of data dissemination, with the Internet in the first place, constitute alternative options to document and illustrate the past, while virtual musealisation creates new exploratory paths, with a view to meeting the needs of remote visitors. At the same time, the continuous miniaturisation and the subsequent portability of equipment lead to the ever fast progress of techniques for the acquisition of archaeological evidence, through geophysics, remote sensing, and robotics: the encounter between the past and the future, therefore, takes place in a present dimension that is increasingly digital in its format.