A Digital Passport to the Past: The ‘Accidental’ Public Archaeology of the Virtual Curation Laboratory

Abstract

As an undergraduate student at Occidental College in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I quickly realized that being a physicist was not how I wanted to spend my few short years on this planet. This meant that I would likely not achieve my dream of becoming an astronaut, but I certainly did not envision that I would trade outer space for cyberspace. Inspired by my freshman-year ‘Magic, Witchcraft, and the Occult’ class, I turned my attention toward anthropology and soon decided to focus on archaeology. I had recently seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, and figured this meant that I would be travelling to exotic lands and dodging giant boulders, deigning to occasionally grace the classroom to teach the next generation of daredevil archaeologists. Perhaps to ensure that I saw beyond the romance of archaeology, my archaeology professor, Dr Luanne Hudson, encouraged me to intern at the Southwest Museum. Here, I spent a semester working with Dr Paul Faulstich, who was curating a new exhibit hall devoted to California Indians. From Dr Faulstich I first learned the issues surrounding the communication of archaeology to the public. I found it particularly challenging to distil an artefact’s complex cultural associations into one or two short sentences that could be understood readily by people of all ages and reading abilities. Later, I became involved with public archaeology as the assistant laboratory director at the Alexandria Archaeology Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. Alexandria’s archaeology laboratory is filled with volunteer technicians, is freely open to visitors, and is situated amongst art galleries in a converted World War I torpedo factory. Despite these occasional forays into public archaeology, and a few while working for private archaeology firms, I assumed that any public archaeology efforts I undertook once I began teaching would be confined to sporadic summer field schools. All that changed when I established the Virtual Curation Laboratory (VCL) in August 2011.