Articles by Enrico Zanini

Methodological reflection on communication in archaeology greatly developed over the past fifteen years. It is now widely accepted that video-narrative medium has a larger potential compared with other media commonly used up to now. The archaeological video can be divided into some different categories - documentary, video update, docudrama - each of them potentially destined to a variety of audiences when the movie is inserted into a narrative framework. By its nature, the archaeological site of Vignale, where the relative poverty of the remains on the ground sharply contrasts with the richness of the 'stories' the site itself can narrate, is an ideal place to test the docudrama-model video. Initially intended to be just an instrument for communicating with and involving local population in the archaeological project as a whole, the video-narrative proved to be a powerful tool in stimulating the research group itself towards a more thoughtful and 'multivocal' recording of the fieldwork done. The output of the project was the making of a brief 'series' of videos, with the general title of 'The Excavation and its Stories. They were initially used as an educational support for younger students in archaeology, but later obtained a wider audience through the web.

The excavation conducted since 2002 by the Department of Archaeology of Siena University in the s.c. Byzantine District near the Pythion shrine in Gortyn (Crete) gave the opportunity to develop some methodological reflections about the documentation of the cognitive process performed during archaeological excavations. From this point of view, GIS represents the end-point of an archaeological documentation system that links finds to their physical dimension and spatial position. But GIS appears to be at a hard point when it comes to recording the other side of archaeological information, linked with non-material evidence, functional and non-spatial relationships. This is the kind of information that emerges from the interaction between the clues and finds system and the reading/understanding ability of the team that does the fieldwork. This kind of interaction finds a better form of expression in a “narrative” language (multi-vocal excavation report and video recording). At the same time the opportunity of using a wiki as a platform for a web-based reconstruction of the team’s “mind map” was experimented. With this kind of system every piece of information can find its “place” for archiving, discussing and publishing.

This paper moves from an analysis of some characteristics of text-writing for multimedia products and moves to a general reflection on the nature of archaeological communication, in its forms as well as in its contents and final goals. Multimedia products represent a new field of development in archaeological communication, due to the possibility of associating among them various 'vectors of information' (text, images, animations, 3d modelling etc.), to obtain the desired informative effect. From another point of view - maybe more interesting - such a new tool of communication imposes a careful reflection on the methodologies, strategies and procedures related to the acquisition of the archaeological data (Which data? How many data? Recorded with which tools and procedures?). Consequently, the reflection on the archaeological publication on multimedia systems is related to the broader debate on an in-depth revision of the theoretical and methodological approaches to the archaeological job in the field.