Archaeologists study the traces people leave behind, in order to learn about their lives. Until recently, those traces were generally on the ground or under it, where gravity inevitably takes the bits and pieces that we cast off or stop using. Twentieth-century technology has given us some ways of resisting this. Our radio and TV signals have escaped earth’s orbit, and so have spaceships and satellites, literally fighting gravity. The future Space Archaeologist will have to travel far to recover some of those ruins.
Some of our flights, though, have taken a more ephemeral route. The Internet has opened up new frontiers of cyberspace, which we have colonized rapidly. Blogs, social networks, and forums are where we scribble our graffiti. And while just a few years ago we were limited to cybertext and photos, we now have fully 3-dimensional places to explore since the development of virtual worlds such as Second Life, which has 50–70,000 users online at any given time. Social scientists of all kinds have followed this development with interest, including archaeologists. Second Life (SL) is a social space where people interact via their avatars, forming groups, communities, and cultures; but it is also a sensual universe of simulated ground, sea, sky, and space, where each user can build a personalized environment limited only by imagination.
Rodney Harrison, in “Excavating Second Life: Cyber-Archaeologies, Heritage and Virtual Communities” (Journal of Material Culture vol. 14, no. 1: 75–106), sees SL as a place where concepts of heritage are played out through these created environments. Heritage conservation in this context means that some virtual constructions are seen as worthy of preservation and special treatment, just as real-world historical and archaeological sites are selectively preserved according to cultural priorities. Harrison’s study reviews statements on blogs and web sites about SL heritage sites such as monuments, replicas of real-life heritage sites, and “conserved buildings,” and so it is largely a textual study rather than a study of the heritage sites themselves. He examines some of the modes in which people experience these sites, for instance whether they visit them alone or in groups, but this information is based on self-reporting rather than observation. He does gather some hard data: He examines the SL visitor statistics for some sites identified as having heritage characteristics, to discover their popularity relative to other SL sites. Harrison also investigates ways that virtual artifacts can be preserved for posterity.
The conclusions he draws are that virtual heritage sites are intended to create a sense of history and communal origins, and that they tend to celebrate elites and rulers rather than ordinary people. This is one of his chief concerns: that alternative viewpoints do not have a voice in these virtual worlds. His concern seems to be based on the fact that there are a few “official” sites in SL that are maintained by Linden Labs (the owning company) and that have some recognized cachet. His concern is puzzling, since any user of SL can build anything desired, and viewpoints are not restricted (apart from some rules about adult content in non-adult areas).
Harrison sometimes takes the idea of virtual archaeology too literally, such as looking for ways to determine the (relative) antiquity of virtual sites. Overall, this is more useful as a thought-provoking piece than as a research piece.
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