The Expansion of Archaeology with the Development of New Digital Technologies

Archaeology traditionally deals with the past through material remains, such as artifacts and sites. However, the necessity of archaeology lies in the multidimensional expansion of intellectual information that allows humanity to adapt to the future. Essentially, it studies human perception and adaptation through material cultural traces, forming a foundation for predicting the direction of human behavior by recording human cognitive tendencies. Given this, in today’s rapidly changing modern society, there is a need to consider future archaeology, which differs in nature from the past. Modern technological innovation has drastically transformed human life in ways previously unimaginable and continues to do so. Although the digital revolution began less than a century ago, widespread artificial intelligence will soon lead human life and thought to operate on a completely different level than throughout human history. This era, often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, signifies a society dominated by digital technology, including AI, robotics, machine learning, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and life sciences. These technologies create new combinations that spark innovation and shape new cultural forms.

The structural changes in society brought about by digital technological advancement will proceed at an enormous speed and scale. The fundamental changes in human cognitive and behavioral patterns will lead to inevitable delays in social adaptation, potentially shaking humanism to its roots. New cultures have always led to adaptive deviations, with humanity adapting through new innovations, extinction, or regressively while enduring pain. We have learned through thousands of years of civilization that the more advanced the civilization, the greater the associated side effects. Now, as we face what is often called the Anthropocene, where humans are part of the ecosystem dominated by technology, what can archaeology do to help humanity? How are human actions fundamentally changing within the digital technological framework, and how should humanity adapt to these changes, whether they are fundamental or phenomenological? These are new issues that traditional archaeology has not addressed.

Archaeology, a discipline that uses various means, including theories and methodologies, to reconstruct past human behavior from very limited material remains, has gradually expanded its archaeological materials and topics and has developed methods to analyze these materials. Despite significant methodological advances in digital age archaeology, an important fact remains: human activity now extends into virtual spaces as well as physical spaces. This means that archaeologists must now consider traces of human consciousness in virtual spaces as their research material, leading to a radical transformation in the field. Specifically, recording and uncovering human cognition, consciousness, and behavior within cyberspace and developing methodologies to explain the cultural significance of such behaviors in this space are now necessary. While the advent of new or processual archaeology in the early 1960s provided a turning point in archaeological thinking, we now face the expansion of archaeological domains into both real and cyber spaces. To contribute creatively to our future society, it is time to ponder how to establish and execute national strategies.

Changes in the Paradigm of Archaeology

Archaeology is a convergent science combining natural and human sciences, involving both field investigations and laboratory research. The term “nogada” (a Korean slang term for hard labor) is sometimes used to describe archaeology due to the physical exertion required in field surveys, which has become a trademark of the discipline. The trowel, a symbol of Western archaeology, is a type of mason’s tool, indicating the difficulty of fieldwork in both Eastern and Western contexts. In the not-so-distant past, archaeologists had to meticulously sketch site plans as artists would, with significant improvements only recently made with high-quality cameras and tools like the theodolite. The advent of modern digital devices, including desktop and laptop computers, 3D scanners, mobile digital devices such as phones and tablets, has revolutionized archaeological recording, allowing for precise and swift documentation and connecting fieldwork, research laboratories, and the public without spatial limitations.

Computational archaeology, a concept that emerged early on, is closely related to modern digital archaeology, cyber archaeology, and virtual archaeology. Digital archaeology and computational archaeology are fields that digitize archaeological practices. Meanwhile, cyber archaeology and virtual archaeology are subfields that involve reconstructing ancient societies within virtual spaces, predefining specific conditions and environments. These fields are not purely scientific reconstructions of ancient societies but allow for some level of imaginative restoration. Despite their limitations, these endeavors have been recognized for their significance and importance in the field. Digital archaeology, although criticized by some as merely an extension of traditional methods, provides unprecedented scales of data and tools for swift and accurate analysis, thus aiding in the development of new explanations and discoveries within the field.

In South Korea, discussions and implementations of digital archaeology are ongoing, though primarily focused on digitizing produced archaeological data and occasionally 3D scanning sites. Some scholars downplay digital technology’s role, viewing it as a methodological service rather than a means of generating new archaeological knowledge or methods. Nevertheless, digital technology has enabled the generation of vast amounts of data, tools for swift analysis, and the discovery of new archaeological facts. Concerns about rapid changes in archaeological knowledge structures have led to the concept of “slow archaeology.” However, considering the rapid advancement of digital devices, digital archaeology is still evolving, with immense strengths in conducting simultaneous field and laboratory projects, reducing verification time, and enabling extensive comparative studies across wide areas.

Digital networks allow researchers in different locations to collaborate in real-time, speeding up the research cycle. Metaverse-based archaeological work offers opportunities for multiple scholars to participate in verification processes, akin to the Human Genome Project’s collaborative data analysis. Consequently, digital archaeology provides a foundation for precise and advanced final judgments, and its application is expected to contribute significantly to future archaeological research. The accumulation of 3D data from heritage sites, driven by countries with the economic and technical capacity, has become routine and is essential for preserving cultural properties threatened by war or natural disasters. The recent situation in Ukraine underscores this need, with 3D scan data proving invaluable for restoration efforts.

The rapid increase in data quality and scale due to digital technology has introduced new methodologies and fields in cultural heritage research, enabling more precise studies of artifacts and multidimensional reconstructions of human consciousness and production processes. Public access to scholarly research through digital exhibition technologies also improves public understanding of academic achievements, enhancing the value of archaeology as a universal science. Feedback from practical applications in sociology and education could further position archaeology as a conclusive science of human behavior. Modern digital archaeologists aim to create “grand challenges” by influencing other academic fields through their digital archaeological work.

The Necessity of Traditional Archaeology in the Digital Age

Digital archaeology is perceived as a tool for enhancing the quality and quantity of archaeological data through digital technology. This work positively impacts related fields by creating a foundation for reexamining natural and human phenomena. However, all disciplines based on material evidence could achieve similar results through scientific and technological advancements. A notable example is astrophysics, which made significant progress when the Hubble Space Telescope began observing the universe in 1990.

Archaeology’s challenge lies elsewhere. Understanding human consciousness and culture is its ultimate goal, but we have yet to develop strategies for the traces of human behavior in the digital age. Although some digital archaeologists have attempted to excavate digital data stored in computers under the title of media archaeology, these efforts have not reached a scholarly level or developed methodologies. Moreover, there have been no continuous attempts to accumulate results to interpret human behavior patterns. Efforts to excavate data from digital cyberspace present a challenge for future archaeology. Various efforts are underway to excavate and restore digital content in cyberspace, but material traces of digital data and cultural content have shown limited results. Modern technology’s dazzling allure has led to a neglect of archaeology’s primary tasks of focusing on past human behavior traces and creating interpretive foundations.

Archaeology is a field that explores the origins of thought by examining the materialized and transformed aspects of past human cognition. It seeks to understand why diverse thoughts emerge through creative thinking, which operates based on a priori and situational judgments. Archaeologists strive to read past human cognitive processes by identifying spatial and temporal patterns and changes. The material reflecting human thought changes and vanishes over time, as seen with prehistoric peoples who used stone and soil to adapt to or overcome nature, and later civilizations that made tools from metals. These materials serve as key bases for dividing historical periods into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and beyond. In the 20th century, humanity added new materials such as plastics and semiconductors, drastically altering human life. Some materials, like iron, have revolutionized human behavior and life over millennia, while others, though important, have not fundamentally changed human history.

However, the digital signal, an electronic technological material that dominates our lives today, despite its brief history, has revolutionized human cognition and behavior, comparable to the most significant shifts in human cultural history. It necessitates recognizing the “Digital Age” not merely as an era where digital tools are used, but as a period marked by the emergence of new materials following stone and metal, leading to the most innovative evolution in human cultural history. Digital culture has introduced unprecedented forms of human thought and behavior, fundamentally altering human actions. New communication environments within cyberspace will change human behavior, with cognitive and behavioral patterns in virtual environments inevitably differing. The perception of objects varies with environmental conditions, a process applicable to virtual spaces as well.

Digital technology, which emerged over 60 years ago, now sees significant portions of human activity reliant on digital systems, leading to electronically materialized human behavior traces. While many areas still use digital spaces as auxiliary tools, digital records from cyberspace may include unique elements not seen in the physical world. Consequently, if archaeology fails to address traces in cyberspace, comprehensive cultural restoration will be unattainable. Future humans will live in markedly different cultures, with key cultural aspects likely residing in digital spaces. Digital phenomena arising from human cognition encompass broad aspects of social life, extending beyond mere informational or technical content. Numerous daily selective behaviors occur within cyberspace, with self-expression and fulfillment through the metaverse diversifying and expanding the relationship between individuals and culture. As digital technology advances, the volume of records within electronic circuits will increase, but these records are also prone to rapid disappearance. Hence, strategies for swiftly collecting modern human behavior records and focusing on human consciousness and actions within the unique environment of cyberspace are essential for a comprehensive restoration of 21st-century human culture.

Human Behaviour and Cultural Change in Cyberspace

In modern society, the space for human activity is divided into natural (reality) and virtual (digital) spaces. Since the explosive spread of the internet in the early 1990s, digital or cyber space has become a medium for communication, with complex activities occurring within digital systems beyond simple information exchange and calculations. The characteristics of digital technology, such as the near-infinite scale and speed of information exchange, accuracy, and simultaneous sharing among multiple users, have revolutionized human life. People’s active adaptation to the digital technological environment has transformed not only simple communication activities but also their daily lives, government operations, and industrial structures. As artificial intelligence develops further, robots will take over human tasks, leading to significant changes.

Dismissing the accumulation of cultural information and changes in communication culture within cyber space as irrelevant to archaeology would be a grave mistake. Creative thinking appears in cyber space, and some behaviors induced by this thinking exist solely within it. If archaeology, which studies people from all periods and social classes, ignores human behavior and culture within cyber space, it risks losing a substantial or core part of modern culture. As mentioned earlier, archaeology studies all material remnants of human activity. Therefore, to capture the subtle and gradual changes in human behavior within rapidly changing cyber space and predict adaptation principles for future societies, it is essential to observe these processes from an ethnographic perspective and utilize them in future archaeology.

The rapid pace of digital cultural change requires a different approach compared to traditional archaeological time concepts. Traditional archaeology studies artifacts from deceased individuals, but in the digital age, cultures that will never be used again remain in digital space even if they are not from deceased individuals. An example is Cyworld, the world’s first social network system that emerged 20 years ago and gained immense popularity. As global corporations operated massive systems, Cyworld became a digital relic. Cyworld, based on Korean social relationships, played an initial role in constructing social network systems today. As various evolved social communication portals developed, simple language-based communication transitioned to an era of visual communication. Today’s social communication platforms are also destined to become relics with the advent of more advanced technologies. Although some view human behavior in natural and digital spaces as “digital twin” behaviors, I disagree. Human behavior occurs in the unique spatial environment of “cyber space,” fundamentally different from the familiar spaces of the past 7 million years.

From a long-term future perspective, although still in its infancy, the emergence of Bitcoin as a value storage and distribution medium and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) representing art copyrights, along with blockchain technology, hints at future structural changes in human society. Various activities within digital space will be restructured to align with digital technology for efficiency, leading to even more changes. Some cultural domains, where traces of human thought and action exist solely within digital space, will undergo rapid changes compared to past cultural transformations. Obsolete technologies will be discarded and become digital relics, serving as valuable materials for reconstructing the developmental processes of digital culture and predicting future technological evolutions.

The electronic signals resulting from human cognition and thought leave traces in electronic circuits. The rapid evolution of technology over the past generation has led to all significant information storage and the initiation of creative thinking within this space, visibly developing in various forms. In the distinctly different spaces of natural and cyber, similar objectives may be pursued, but the residuals will differ. Given the frequency of human thoughts and choices, regional differences and technological advancement speeds will produce different outcomes. As technology advances and globalization accelerates, the distance between production and consumption in human activities will widen, resulting in numerous choices.

Human activities confined to digital space are rapidly increasing. Various human activities communicated through platforms will leave few records, and human activities related to various big data provided by large portals will exist in various forms within digital space. The data aggregation by large portals, formed for accuracy and efficiency, will inevitably be actively used for survival, resulting in numerous selective activities. This cyber space is a daily site of extensive human activities, from purchasing everyday items to sourcing academic research materials. As third-generation digital technology becomes a reality, the methods of utilizing digital technology will fundamentally change, and existing technologies will repeatedly undergo obsolescence.

Methodology of Cyber Archaeology

Field excavation is a distinctive and highly impressive methodological process in archaeology. Two major methodological genres can be considered for studying human activity within digital space archaeologically. One approach is historical archaeological, while the other involves modern digital observation of ongoing selective activities, ultimately aligning with digital ethnographic approaches. Questions may arise about the necessity of such approaches in archaeology. However, since archaeology’s initial purpose involves ethnographic cultural restoration through material remains, its validity is recognized. Depending on the starting point, research purposes can vary, and the human activities within digital space today are extensive and rapidly accumulating.

Even if both fields accumulate research independently, the scope and quantity will not deviate significantly from traditional archaeological research. Given that the timeframe is shorter and the cultural activities are ongoing, some may argue that it belongs to the realm of anthropology. Nevertheless, considering the rapid nature of digital cultural change, convergence research with cultural anthropology might pave the way for a new genre, such as digital archaeo-anthropology within multimodal anthropology.

Some might argue that the brief timeframe makes it unsuitable for archaeology. However, human thoughts and choices within digital space change rapidly, and viewing the innovative systems emerging from these behaviors with the same absolute time units as past human history is problematic. The communication culture of the 1990s is already considered an “archaeological era” within digital space, thus making it a period for archaeological study. Cultures that are no longer in use emerge within a short timeframe in the digital realm. Changes in communication methods, such as from formal text messages to concise emoticons, exemplify the rapid pace of cultural change. Comparing the computer era with the non-computer era, analog phones, digital phones, and smartphones, we can infer the timeframe and duration for future digital archaeology. If we do not exceed the academic standards set by past people and generations, many aspects of modern culture will be lost, and their meanings will be forever unreadable.

Considering the more fundamental issue of digital transition within each era, the frequency of digital activities may vary depending on the digital cultural context and individual or social preferences. Technological advancements will significantly influence the degree of digital cultural adoption. For example, the proliferation of smartphones has broadened the scope of digital utilization. Cases exist where data from discarded digital devices, such as computers and mobile phones, have been collected and analyzed. Such attempts will continue, but to draw archaeologically meaningful conclusions, methods for handling vast amounts of data must first be developed. Without such methods, processing the enormous volume of data will be challenging. Given the unprecedented scale of digital data compared to traditional archaeological data, discussions on methodologies for extracting meaningful data are essential.

Even if electronic or magnetic traces remain in digital space, human consciousness and behavior may not be preserved due to technological limitations and various data loss incidents. This situation is comparable to the destruction or transformation of archaeological sites, leading to lost information. Fortunately, many paper records from the digital age allow us to cross-reference different past records, enhancing the potential to reconstruct past human consciousness and behavior within cyber space. Comparing different data types is crucial for restoring and explaining the significance of digital data.

In digital age archaeology, rapidly finding ways to restore data from obsolete computers and storage devices is methodologically crucial. This involves developing devices capable of reading codes stored in older computer equipment and storage devices with different technological backgrounds. Although continuous conversions might preserve important and persistent data, discovering devices to read such data might be difficult if conversions are not maintained. Common examples include the scarcity of magnetic tape readers and computers with built-in CD-ROM drives. Comparing past and modern technologies also raises issues of overcoming information imbalances caused by technological gaps.

Above all, it is advisable to precede cyber archaeology methodologies with ethnographic observations of cultural patterns in non-digital spaces. Such studies can develop meaningful themes in cyber archaeology and form the premise for developing efficient methodologies to extract vast cyber space data. Collaborating with cyber or digital experts and ethnographic research specialists is crucial, given the close association with recent human activities.

The Expansion of Archaeological Themes in the Digital Age and Its Necessity

Archaeology provides databases and big data related to human society’s creative adaptation, simultaneously possessing characteristics of both humanities and social sciences. It strives to restore human judgment and behavioral execution processes encapsulated in past artifacts and sites. As beings capable of future-oriented thinking, humans have continually collected and preserved information since the dawn of humanity. Archaeological research is a higher-level execution of this instinctual behavior of information accumulation. Archaeological activities conducted within the human adaptation system, focusing on past information accumulation and future preparedness, ultimately enhance human society’s sustainability, explaining archaeology’s social legitimacy.

To address future problems in the digital society, archaeology identifies issues from past choices and behavioral records within cyber space and strives to secure sufficient reference materials. Although archaeologists have traditionally performed such tasks academically, the current challenge lies in the pace of change. Accurate future predictions and a collection of reliable past examples (trustworthy references) enable human society to adapt healthily. How to activate the adaptation base amidst the anticipated inequality and environmental pollution from the expanding convenience of the digital society will be key to humanity’s survival in the Anthropocene. A continuous analysis based on topic selection and past information collection for sustainable future society construction is necessary.

Ultimately, the solution to humanity’s problems must guarantee flexibility in thinking and accuracy in choice, as demonstrated by past diverse cases, which serve as rich resources for creative adaptation. Future archaeology’s task is to collect and analyze various examples to address imminent human issues. Although new topics are continually proposed and expanded in international archaeological forums, the global archaeological community, particularly in East Asia, should focus on regional examples to create data pools and explain processes.

The use of various digital technologies for recording and analytical purposes is a significant advantage of modern archaeology. The extensive use of archaeological intellectual information as a means of education and cultural enjoyment through digital technology greatly contributes to the popularization of archaeological information. This popularization significantly enhances public understanding of past information and knowledge, representing a considerable advantage of future archaeology. Efforts are needed to use this popular foundation to expand archaeology and enhance global societal sustainability. Constant efforts to highlight the utility and applicability of archaeological information to contemporary issues and future problems are essential. Ensuring that archaeological efforts demonstrate value within the framework of major academic domains is a crucial task.

Typically, it is believed that archaeology does not focus on the last hundred years. However, the last hundred years have passed in human civilization’s evolution, and the world has undergone fundamental changes in human thought and lifestyle. Archaeologists must deeply recognize that the rapid changes in modern society have induced more profound human cultural transformations than all previous eras combined. The processes of creation and extinction of human thought within digital space over the past generation will be crucial future indicators. The cultural change processes occurring within global multi- and intercultural spaces will provide a compressed view of human behavioral patterns within digital space. Thus, archaeological approaches to human thought and behavior in cyber space will profoundly understand humanity’s future, far beyond discussing technological advances in material terms. The social polarization resulting from the proliferation and spread of digital technology has led to the designation of modern society as a digital complex society, foretelling a fundamental transformation surpassing the emergence of ancient complex societies.

From 2020 to 2023, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly expanded the utilization of cyber space, establishing it as a universal tool beyond real life into academic realms. Cyber space, or digital networks, has exponentially increased its usage as a space for human thought, behavior, and communication. Consequently, future-oriented archaeological preparedness has become a necessity rather than a choice. Failing to record substantial parts of human behavior and missing many aspects of rapidly progressing cultural change will result in significant losses. Therefore, archaeology of the contemporary period, regarded as our present, inherently possesses the legitimacy of future archaeology. Archaeological approaches to human activities within digital space today will provide fundamental information sources for future methodologies, enabling humanity to prepare for its future.

“Cyber Archaeology for Building a Sustainable Future”

Throughout the revolutionary development of archaeology, techniques like stratigraphy, seriation, and absolute dating have been milestones. Similarly, the changes brought about by digital technology in modern archaeology have led to significant technical advancements in methodologies. While there is great hopeful anticipation that these advancements will change methods of approaching human culture, the fact remains that the quality and quantity of archaeological data have already innovatively transformed, evolving to stages where global patterns can be observed more accurately. However, current archaeology has yet to adequately address the unique human thoughts and expressions occurring within cyber space. Although the concept is not entirely new, previous pioneering attempts have been fragmented and lacked substantial progress. These efforts observed patterns and changes within very short periods, making meaningful research difficult. Given archaeology’s fundamental task of restoring past human cultures, it must also study digital cultures and civilizations that leave no material remnants and disappear. Ethnographic approaches for recording and research are necessary, implying the need to expand study subjects to include ‘digital culture’ within the research of vanished ‘human groups.’ Future archaeology’s historical mission involves reconstructing the extensive evolution of human culture through the interaction of these two cultures.

Recognizing the immense cultural information provided by digital archaeology or archaeology in the digital age, leading countries have established extensive support systems for systematic information aggregation and analysis. The United States supports university network systems through the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. Australia has implemented the Federated Archaeological Information Management Systems program. Whether current digital archaeology projects, digitization of existing archaeological materials, or the aggregation of cultural heritage data, a new system and manpower supported at the national level are required. Digital age archaeology, studying a new cultural phase, should involve interdisciplinary research with archaeologists and experts from related fields to establish and develop methodologies and new theoretical frameworks for human behavior patterns. Particularly, digital age archaeology should position itself as a leading research field on human society in the digital cultural phase, capable of forming intellectual systems predicting new cultural evolution patterns and directions. Hence, significant national interest and support are essential, enabling South Korea, an IT powerhouse, to lead the world in cultural research.