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Examiner The purpose of archaeology is to reimagine how people lived in the distant past. A site is excavated, crumbling foundations unearthed, potsherds analyzed, all towards the goal of conveying the fullest, most vivid image possible of how a place looked once upon a time. Well, the archaeology department at UC Berkeley has brought a whole new meaning to this objective, using the online virtual reality game Second Life. 
Since 2006, archaeology professor Ruth Tringham and her students at Berkeley have been using the Second Life platform to reconstruct a full-scale virtual model of Catalhoyuk, a 9,000-year-old Neolithic archaeological site in central Turkey. Using topology maps and current scholarly research, they have recreated the ancient site as archaeologists believe it once looked. The product is a village of tightly clustered houses entered by ladder through holes in the ceiling. In some cases, students have even reconstructed the interiors of homes, down to minute details of its layout, wall decorations and furniture. One student, who had participated in (non-virtual world) excavations of such houses, commented in a youtube video: "it was fun that I got to build [a house] instead of take it apart for once." For its dense architecture, ornate wall decorations, and the array of clay figurines it has yieleded, Catalhoyuk (Cha-tal-hu-yuk) may be the world's most important resource for our understanding of the Neolithic Age.While many archaeological sites use technology such as this program for exploring Egyptian monuments to allow online visitors to get a feel for a site from their laptops, the environment at Second Life affords a whole new level of interaction. Tringham's students essentially create a Second Life avatar or "resident" which they can navigate at will (using a Peter Pan-ish flying manuever) throughout the virtual simulacrum of Catalhoyuk. The video shows Tringham's avatar delivering a lecture to her students' gathered around her, while (in a sense) on location in Catalhoyuk. Supported by Open Knowledge and Public Interest (OKAPI), which "uses their virtual real-estate to explore new forms of teaching learning and public outreach," Tringham's Second Life experiment addresses fascinating debates on our perception of space in the context of archaeology. Such as, "How do we express the senses of a place that in the past was alive with people, events and meaning, and now seems dead and empty?" It will be interesting to see how such devices are used by archaeologists going forward as a way to convey the significance of a space to the general public.
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