orld is also applicable in the synthetic. Christopher Tilley articulates this in “Phenomenological Approaches to Landscape Archaeology.” The more we experience a landscape in person, the more we understand its rules, which include formation processes and use by both human and non-human actors.
In “Object Fragmentation and Past Landscapes,” John Chapman writes that “landscapes consist of a network of places, some natural, some culturally constituted, some created by human manipulation of the landscape. It is this network of places that gives human lives their meaning, through an identification of past activities and present embodiment.”
This also describes synthetic landscapes and the networks that run atop them: some created by human manipulation (players create networks through their own agency in a synthetic world), some culturally constituted (these networks are created in advance and by design prior to player-arrival), and some natural (emergent behavior independent of player or designer agency).
So what’s in a landscape then that immediately grabs the archaeologist’s eye? Architecture is a start, and is one of the things most easily recognizable in synthetic worlds. Players expect architecture, and most games deliver. As part of the synthetic landscape, architecture behaves in the same way as its natural counterpart: it is recognizable, is used/re-used, assists in wayfinding, and contributes to the understanding of a place’s present and past. This raises an interesting point regarding determining the age of something in a synthetic world. How do we do this?
Dating landscapes in synthetic worlds varies greatly from those that are natural. This is perhaps the greatest difference between the two. In synthetic worlds, there is no real stratigraphy, and no real superposition of layers of earth. For most synthetic worlds, there is no geologic time. The spaces just sit there not eroding, unless you count “bit rot,” the slow decay of underlying data. The archaeologist is left with software version and build numbers, which are tied to absolute dates in the natural world. But inside the game, landscapes can be made to look old (or to imply age), even though the game itself has only been playable for a few days. Even playing older games results in landscapes that look exactly the same now as they did in 1983. Little, if anything, changes.
Regardless of when they were created/accessed, these synthetic landscapes in games can provide insight into how people (and their things) move from place to place, offering glimpses into what players (or non-human agents) carry with them, use, sell, or discard. In observing in-game habits of players as well as coded entities, especially in games where the landscape can vary (or can be varied), the archaeologist can begin to experiment with agent-based modeling (ABM), making modest (or radical) changes in order to run experiments to see what happens. In some cases, landscapes could be modeled after those in the natural world to assist in answering archaeological questions about earthbound places and the people who used them.
How does an archaeologist conduct landscape archaeology within a synthetic world? It’s not terribly different from working in the natural world, as articulated by Thomas Richards in his article, “Suvey Strategies in Landscape Archaeology”: first develop a research question. Once a research question is developed, a suitable landscape must be selected. Research problems often require a landscape to be representative of a larger area, so the distributional patterns of the surface record and associated human behavioral interpretations can be widely extrapolated. Following the selection of a regional landscape study area, the formation of its present surface characteristics needs to be considered in developing a survey strategy: geomorphology and vegetation (which affects visibility of the ground surface). Try to determine human land-use history, particularly large-scale ground disturbance activities. Determine the intensity and coverage of your initial survey. Decide on the sc