Communicating the Past in the Digital Age

Front matter

Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Methods in Teaching and Learning in Archaeology (12-13 October 2018)

Sebastian Hageneuer

Jul ubiquity press London

Contents

Acknowledgements v Contributors vii Competing Interests xvii Introduction 1

Sebastian Hageneuer, Sophie C. Schmidt

Archaeogaming 11

Index

This publication would not have been possible if I had not been awarded with a Fellowship for Innovation in Digital Academic Teaching in 2017, which enabled me not only to buy equipment for our (then) brand-new master’s programme in archaeoinformatics at the University of Cologne but also to host a two-day international symposium, of which this volume represents the results. I am therefore very grateful to the insightful funding of teaching projects by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German state of North Rhine Westphalia. To the Stifterverband, which administered the funding, I am thankful for the counsel I received during my fellowship time.

Iam also very grateful for the friendly environment in which I was able to conduct my fellowship and my work as a research associate at the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne, namely to the head of my department, Professor Eleftheria Paliou, who supported me in my endeavours, and my colleague Sophie Schmidt, who assisted me whenever I needed her to. I also want to thank Christine Avenarius and Laurenz Hillman, who helped as student assistants throughout the symposium and made our guests feel very welcome. Thanks also go out to Visa Immonen, Andrew Reinhard and on other anonymous peer reviewer, whose insightful comments on the draft helped to improve the publication. Finally, I want to thank all the participants of the symposium, whose acquaintances I enjoyed making and whom I hope to meet again in the near future.

Contributors

Ariese, Csilla E.

Dr Csilla E. Ariese is a museologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Within the Horizon 2020 ECHOES Project, she studies how the Amsterdam Museum is (dis)engaging with the complex colonial pasts of the museum and the city. She is also a co-founder of the VALUE Foundation, which playfully engages with gaming and academia, among others resulting in the edited book The Interactive Past (Sidestone, 2017). Csilla is a storyteller at heart, who is passionate about shipwrecks, ruins, the underwater world, games and museums. In 2018, she completed her PhD, The Social Museum in the Caribbean, as part of the ERC-Synergy project NEXUS1492 at Leiden University. The same year, she was the curator for the exhibition Culture Arcade at the Prince Claus Fund Gallery in Amsterdam. Besides her PhD, she holds an MSc in international museum (2012) and a BA in maritime archaeology (2010), both from Gothenburg University.

Boom, Krijn H.J.

Leiden University and VALUE Foundation

Dr Krijn Boom is a post-doctoral researcher and heritage manager with the Economies of Destruction (VICI)-project at the Faculty of Archaeology of viii Contributors

Leiden University, the Netherlands. In this combined function, he studies the social and economic impact of Bronze Age depositions in north-west Europe and manages public outreach and knowledge utilisation. Krijn also has a position as Project Manager Blended Learning at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Science, combining his love for media and science in order to innovate teaching and provide students with a meaningful, yet fun way of learning. Krijn is co-founder of the VALUE project - for research and outreach on the past, heritage and video games, which was later formalised as the VALUE Foundation, opening up to other academic sectors.

Champion, Erik Malcolm

Curtin University

Professor Erik Champion is UNESCO Chair of Cultural Visualisation and Heritage at Curtin University and theme leader for visualisation at the Curtin Institute of Computation, Australia (http://computation.curtin.edu.au). He researches virtual heritage, game design, interactive media, and architectural computing. Prior to joining Curtin University, he was project leader of DIGHUMLAB Denmark, hosted at Aarhus University. Here he worked with EU research infrastructures and projects, such as http://dariah.eu. His publications include Organic Design in Twentieth-Century Nordic Architecture (Routledge, 2019), Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage (Routledge, 2015) and Playing with the Past (Springer, 2011). He edited The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places in 2018, co-edited Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2017) with Agiati Benardou, Costis Dallas and Lorna Hughes, and edited Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism (ETC Press, 2012). He is currently writing a monograph, Rethinking Virtual Places, for the Spatial Humanities Series (Indiana University Press). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5362-6176

Cook, Katherine

Dr Katherine Cook is an assistant professor in public archaeology at the University of Montreal, Canada. Moving through the histories of Canada, the Caribbean and Western Europe, her work examines the ethics, politics and practice of memory and heritage in colonial narratives and present-day research contexts. In particular, her work critically engages with the application of (digital) technologies and the ways in which they are used to generate, preserve, negotiate, modify or even destroy the past, the ways in which we imagine it, and who has access. As an instructor, she also works on pedagogical questions relating to experiential or applied learning, the decolonisation of education (and archaeological training), and transforming closed classrooms into incubators for public archaeology projects.

Contributors ix

Hageneuer, Sebastian

Sebastian Hageneuer is a Near Eastern archaeologist and currently a research associate in archaeoinformatics (computational archaeology) at the University of Cologne, Germany. In 2008, he co-founded ARTEFACTS, a company for the visualisation of archaeological results that specialised in the virtual reconstruction of ancient architecture (artefacts-berlin.de). Since 2013, he has been part of a research group of the Excellence Cluster TOPOI at the Free University of Berlin, which focuses on the significance of size in the architecture of the ancient Near East. He specialises in the scientific reconstruction of ancient architecture and in 3D methods for archaeology. In 2017, he received a fellowship for innovations in teaching with digital methods by the Ministry of Science and Culture of North Rhine Westphalia. His currently ongoing PhD focuses on the development and reception of reconstruction drawings of the 19th and 20th century in Near Eastern archaeology.

Hiriart, Juan

Juan Hiriart is a PhD candidate at the School of Arts and Media in the University of Salford, in Greater Manchester, UK, where he teaches games design and production. His research focuses on exploring the suitability of digital games for the representation of historical knowledge, and the ways in which these technologies can be used in formal and informal learning environments. Before starting his doctoral studies, he worked for a range of creative industries, acquiring experience in illustration, animation and interactive design. He also worked for several years in the games industry, developing casual, mobile and serious games. You can read his more recent academic outputs at https:// usir.salford.ac.uk/view/authors/58074.html.

Hölscher, David Frederik

Kiel University

David F. Hölscher studied prehistorical and historical archaeology, medieval archaeology, archaeology of the Roman provinces and history between 2009 and 2016 at the Universities of Freiburg i. Br. (Germany), Gothenburg (Sweden) and Kiel (Germany). After working in the field of communication design, he became a member of the scientific staff and a doctoral candidate at KiSOC (Kiel Science Outreach Campus), a joint project of the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) and Kiel University, in January 2018. His research interests cover (among others) science communication, human-landscape interactions, popularisation and popular perceptions of history and archaeology, experimental archaeology, and the Early Middle Ages in middle and northern Europe. David was an associate member of the graduate school ‘Human Development in Landscapes’ at Kiel University (end of funding 2018).

x Contributors

Holter, Erika

Humboldt- Universitat zu Berlin

Erika Holter is a PhD candidate in classical archaeology at Humboldt- Universitat zu Berlin, Germany, writing her dissertation on mosaic floor ensembles in Roman houses. She has experience working on several projects in the area of digital archaeology. The project digitales forum romanum uses digital 3D reconstructions of the architecture of the Forum in order to foster and further research into this ancient space. A further project, Analog Storage Media - Auralizing Ancient Spaces, applies a wide array of digital tools - acoustic simulations, auralisations, game engines and virtual reality - to reconstructions of ancient spaces, in order to understand what these new tools can offer historical research.

van den Hout, Bram

International Institute of Social History Amsterdam and VALUE Foundation Bram van den Hout is a junior researcher at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a board member of the VALUE Foundation (http://value-foundation.org). In his capacity at the IISH he adapts new technologies and software for use within the institute and has co-written a book and three articles on slavery and the slave trade in the Dutch VOC empire. Together with VALUE, he aims to bring academia and video games together to find (and provide voice to) new research fields and subjects.

Katifori, Akrivi

Athena Research Center and University of Athens

Dr Akrivi Katifori holds a PhD degree (An Intelligent System for Managing Historical Archive Documents), a BSc in informatics and Telecommunications (2000) and an MSc from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens, Greece (2003). She has participated in European and national RTD projects, including Papyrus, CHESS, WhoLoDancE and EMOTIVE, and has authored several papers in different research areas of computer science, including information visualisation, virtual museums, digital libraries and digital storytelling.

Kourtis, Vassilis

Athena Research Center and National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Vassilis Kourtis is a research associate and software engineer in the Athena Research Center and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He holds an engineering diploma from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of NTUA and he has recently completed his MA in digital communication media and interactive environments from the Department

Contributors xi of Communication and Media Studies of NKUA. His interests include usercentred design and the development of interactive environments for both the digital and the physical space, interactive digital storytelling, gamified experiences and serious games. His work focuses on applications of digital technologies in cultural heritage and education and he is involved in the CHESS (FP7) and EMOTIVE (H2020) European projects. Other works include the creation of cultural heritage experiences for small museums and cultural heritage sites in Greece and abroad, and the development of educational games for high schools in Greece.

McKinney, Sierra

Sierra McKinney holds an MSc in Digital Heritage from the University of York, having previously studied Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She is currently developing digital educational experiences for the EMOTIVE Project, in which she is able to explore her research interests regarding the use of digital technologies to create accessible and emotive heritage.

Marti, Ana

Universitat Politécnica de Valencia

Dr Ana Marti Testön is an associate professor at the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and Art History in the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia, Spain. Her research profile is specialised in photography, digitalisation of collections, education and cultural management. Over the last five years, she has specialised in the analysis of communication strategies for museum collections through digital media, 4.0 technology, and augmented reality. She also belongs to the Research Institute of Design and Manufacturing, where she has developed several national and international projects related to Europeana, digital heritage and museums.

Mol, Angus A.A.

Leiden University and VALUE Foundation

Dr Angus Mol is an assistant professor at Leiden University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, the Netherlands. In his research he combines the study of history using a digital approach with the study of how today’s digital cultures are entwined with history. In particular, he looks at how contemporary play functions as a mirror of the past, as well as how games can be used to democratise access to the past. He has authored several papers on the topic and crowdfunded an open-access edited volume with chapters from scholars and professionals from the creative industry. He is one of the founding members of VALUE (http://value-foundation.org). With a PhD in archaeology, Angus also has a keen interest in projects that combine social theory, material culture, xii Contributors and digital media and tools. For instance, he uses experimental games, network analyses or agent-based models to explore and explain how things and people are entangled over time.

Muñoz, Adolfo

Universitat Politécnica de Valencia

Dr Adolfo Muñoz Garcia is the professor of the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and Art History, in the Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia (UPV), Spain. He teaches several subjects about digital media and programmation at the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Informatics Engineering. He does research in UPV’s Institute of Design and Manufacturing (IDF). His research profile specialises in the design of multimedia applications, video games and graphical interfaces, 3D simulations and augmented applications. Currently he directs the AR division of the IDF, where different projects are being developed using the HoloLens augmented reality glasses for productive and cultural industries.

Perry, Sara

Dr Sara Perry is a senior lecturer in cultural heritage management at the University of York, UK, anda lead on the EU-funded EMOTIVE Project (www. emotiveproject.eu). She has directed heritage interpretation programmes at archaeological sites around the world, including Çatalhöyük in Turkey (www. catalhoyuk.com); Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt (http://memphisegypt. org); and Pangani in Tanzania (www.conchproject.org).

Politopoulos, Aris

Leiden University and VALUE Foundation

Aris Politopoulos is a lecturer in the archaeology of the Near East at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, the Netherlands. He studied archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and did his MA degree at the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden on the archaeology of the ancient Near East. He is currently finishing his doctorate at Leiden University, researching the creation, construction and function of the capital cities of Assyria. Aris has also been a founding member of the VALUE project, a foundation that works at the crossroads of gaming and academia. Together with VALUE, he hosted the Interactive Pasts Conference, the first conference focusing on the topic of archaeology and video games. He has published several papers on the topic and he is co-editor of the book The Interactive Past: Archaeology, Heritage, and Video Games (Sidestone, 2017).

Contributors xiii

Quick, Stephan

LVR-Archaeological Park Xanten / LVR-RémerMuseum

Stephan Quick is responsible for education and mediation at the LVR- Archaeological Park Xanten / LVR-RömerMuseum, Germany (LVR-APX). He studied classics and archaeology at the University of Münster and the University of Nottingham. Since his previous work for the LWL-Römermuseum Haltern am See and the Varusschlacht im Osnabrücker Land - Museum und Park Kalkriese, he has specialised in the field of museum education. His work at the educational service at LVR-APX focuses on the development of different learning programmes for visitors of all target groups. One of his special interests is finding new and innovative ways to mediate Roman history and archaeology by using digital media tools in the museum.

Remmy, Michael

Michael Remmy studied classical archaeology, Christian archaeology and ancient history in Bonn and Berlin. After his master of arts with a study on Greek Sculptures in Roman Contexts, he went to Cologne to work at the Research Archive for Ancient Sculpture. All his work in different projects connects to the ARACHNE project. This internationally renowned object database opened his eyes to research on the semantic web, ontologies for concepts in cultural heritage documentation and big data. He has worked as a work package leader for the University of Cologne team within the Horizon 2020 project ArchAIDE (Archaeological Automatic IDentification and Classification of cEramics). Michael gathered experience in organising and establishing workflows for this EU project as well as enhancing his knowledge of Roman pottery. Furthermore, his academic research lies in developing concepts to improve teaching archaeology. He teaches classes in classical archaeology and the archaeology of the Roman provinces as well as archaeoinformatics (computational archaeology). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2121-8327

Riethus, Anna

Neanderthal Museum Foundation

Anna Riethus works as scientific project manager of research project NMsee at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany (a cooperation with BSVN e.V.). Within this project, she researches how app games can help archaeological museums to become more inclusive for people with visual disabilities. Before that, she supported the museum as scientific assistant and marketing officer from 2016. From 2012 to 2016, Anna studied prehistory and historical archaeology in Vienna, as well as archaeology and museum studies in Leiden. Beforehand, she trained as an engineer in garden and landscape design. Anna has joined archaeological excavations in France, Wales, Siberia, Austria and Germany and received training at the NHM Vienna and the Weltmuseum Wien.

xiv Contributors

Rubio-Campillo, Xavier

Dr Xavier Rubio-Campillo is a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. His main task at this position is to explore and teach new digital approaches to interpreting and presenting the heritage generated by past human activity. Before joining the school in 2016, he worked as the team leader of the humanities research group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (2009-2016). He participated in several interdisciplinary projects applying computational methods to improve our understanding of the past, such as SimulPast and EpNet. His research also studies how interactive digital methods can be used to present archaeological findings to a larger audience. From this perspective, he explores how video game design can integrate educational goals within transformational experiences able to promote critical thinking about the human past.

Schmidt, Sophie C.

Sophie C. Schmidt is a research associate in archaeoinformatics (computational archaeology) at the University of Cologne, Germany. She studied ancient studies and prehistoric archaeology at the Free University of Berlin and received her MA in prehistoric archaeology there in 2016. Her thesis consisted of a Geostatistical Analysis of Settlement Patterns from the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age along a street excavation in Saxony-Anhalt (Middle Germany). In Cologne, she has been teaching quantitative methods for archaeologists, which, advocating for reproducible research, she implements in the programming language R. Recently she taught a class on concepts of the past in computer and video games, for which she received special funding by the University of Cologne. Next to her research interests in quantitative and GIS methods, settlement archaeology and archaeogaming, voluntary work at excavations at Neolithic sites in Turkey, Scotland, Bolivia and Germany reveal her global interest in the Neolithic.

Schwesinger, Sebastian

Humboldt- Universitat zu Berlin

Sebastian Schwesinger studied cultural history and theory, musicology, philosophy and business administration in Berlin, Essen, London and Vlissingen. He works as a research associate at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Germany. His PhD project focuses on the media history of virtual acoustics. He is coordinator of the project Analog Storage Media. Auralization of Archaeological Spaces at the Image Knowledge Gestaltung cluster of excellence at Humboldt- Universitat zu

Contributors xv

Berlin. His research interests include models of sonic thinking and reasoning, the interplay of sonic materiality and infrastructure design, and cultural economics. Together with Felix Gerloff, he organises the open colloquium and public lecture series KlangDenken (sonic thinking) in Berlin. He is also a member of gamelab.berlin.

Competing Interests

The editor declares that he has no competing interests in publishing this book.

Sebastian Hageneuer, Sophie C. Schmidt

Over recent decades, digital methods have increasingly pervaded every aspect of archaeological knowledge production, from data collection, analysis and interpretation to interaction with the public, as well as exchange between scholars (see e.g. Morgan 2019: 325; Huggett 2019). This development began in the 1960s and has since slowly moved into higher education (Perkins et al. 1992; Schiitz-Pitan et al. 2018). University courses on 3D modelling, computer simulation, or serious games - to name just a few - which until a few years ago were considered niche, are gradually included in a growing number of undergraduate and postgraduate archaeology curricula. At the same time, as 3D and interactive technologies are becoming more and more affordable, a proliferation of digital tools, ranging from virtual and augmented reality applications and interactive displays to mobile apps, have been made available for the communication of the past in museums and via the internet. In light of these developments, this volume aims to encourage a productive debate on the potential and challenges of using digital methods for teaching and learning in archaeology. Unfortunately, academic teaching in general is often thought of as the byproduct of the researching scientist. It is not teaching but third party-funded projects that bring academic revenue for the researcher, the institute and the university, whereas good teaching is rarely rewarded (Wosnitza et al. 2014

Hageneuer, S. and Schmidt, S. C. 2020. Introduction. In: Hageneuer, S. (ed.) Communicating the Past in the Digital Age: Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Methods in Teaching and Learning in Archaeology (12-13 October 2018). Pp. 1-10. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ bch.a. License: CC-BY 4.0 summarise several studies showing the same attitudes). This leads to an undervaluation of good university-level teaching, which engages students and allows them to develop critical thinking, empathy and integrity. Nevertheless, we firmly believe that teaching is at the very core of universities as well as the archaeological discipline itself and that we need to re-evaluate the way we communicate our knowledge to our students. This holds especially true with the already-mentioned technological developments in the archaeological field. Being an archaeologist today incorporates much more than it did 20 years ago. Today, there is a need for well-educated digital-oriented archaeologists who know and understand the needs of modern-day fieldwork.

Universities and museums are by definition places of teaching and learning (Paletschek 2002; Walz 2016: 9). Outside of these institutions, too, the interest in spreading results was always present. By the 18th and 19th century, researchers such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Sir Austen Henry Layard were already not only researching but also disseminating their knowledge to the public in approachable ways (Layard 1851; 1853; Winckelmann 1760). They found a way to relate to the audience. In light of the digital developments outlined above, we therefore want to present methods and tools of today that improve digital teaching and learning in archaeology in- and outside academia.

Since 2016, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German state of North Rhine Westphalia has been awarding annual fellowships for innovative ways of digital teaching at university level. The aim is to develop and test methods of digital teaching in various fields and in this way transform and strengthen the way we teach at the university. In 2017 the editor of this volume was able to obtain a fellowship which funded not only new technology for the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Cologne but also the organisation of a two-day international symposium on the given topic and its open-access publication, in which you are currently reading these lines.

The symposium was held at the University of Cologne (Germany) from 12 to 13 October 2018, with international scholars from Australia, Canada and Europe, and focused on teaching and learning archaeology with digital methods. In these two days, we had wonderful presentations and discussions of like-minded educators from universities as well as museums that have a shared interest in digital teaching and learning. The symposium was divided into five sessions: archaeogaming, learning in the museum, digital tools in the classroom, digital learning environments, and technical demonstrations. The last session offered participants in the symposium hands-on experience of some of the presented tools. This session did not translate well into a book, but, as the projects are described and published here in detail, we hope readers may get a glimpse into their practical applications. Therefore, the contributions to the volume at hand are divided into the first four sections of the symposium. As is always the case, some of them would have fitted more than one category but were kept in their assigned sessions.

Introduction 3

The sessions have been constructed to mirror the variety of applications for the symposium and thus can show only a select view of the possibilities of digital teaching and learning in archaeology. We did not focus on how digitalisation may undermine the old clear-cut division between those who teach and those who are taught (although Remmy or Boom et al. in this volume do) and in this way help to develop a more participatory culture (as put forward by Giaccardi 2012). Citizen science is not just a buzzword but a successful practice (Smith 2014; or see e.g. DigVentures), academic teaching does not need to happen in a classroom and teaching through digital and social media is already part of archaeological education and outreach (MOOCs, Twitter, Skype a Scientist, and much more). Digitalisation and education should also play a role in postcolonial discourses and discourses of decolonisation, as exemplified by Cook's submission to this volume. However, our volume mostly presents techniques and methods of teaching and learning programmes of European, North American or Australian institutions. We express our hope, though, that a successor volume will focus on initiatives that have come to the fore, such as the decolonisation of archives (Cushman 2013) or, more recently, Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s report to the French president, in which the sharing of digitised objects of cultural heritage plays a role (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 67). Certainly, the contributions to this volume touch upon topics of decolonialisation and postcolonialism; nevertheless, we do not pretend to cover the theme to its full extent. Digitalisation in archaeology also involves issues of ‘democratisation or at least the hope for that, especially in the realm of knowledge production. We are therefore delighted that a number of speakers focus on free and openly available software solutions (see e.g. Remmy, Rubio-Campillo and Boom et al. in this volume), which undermine established power structures and monetary barriers and thus level the playing field of digital teaching. In this regard, we are also happy to offer this volume as a freely available digital open-access version through the publisher's website.

The first part of this volume consists of chapters related to the relatively new term of archaeogaming (Reinhardt 2018: 2-4), which refers to the archaeology both in and of digital games. In many digital games, reconstructions of the past are created or archaeologists depicted and these representations have largely gone uncommented or are not influenced by historians and archaeologists, who therefore could not impact the kind of knowledge disseminated by these games. The importance of this issue has been recently underlined by Daniel Giere, who developed an empirical study of the influence that digital games have on historical narratives offered by players. He could conclude convincingly that games have an impact on how history is conceived and that game content is being learned and memorised as historical knowledge (Giere 2019). Later contributions in this volume will highlight how players engage with games on an emotional level and how this influences learning behaviour (see Hiriart and McKinney et al. in this volume). The archaeogaming section focuses more on the aspects of how gameplay, game mechanics and representation in different games may further the teaching and learning of archaeology.

Erik Malcolm Champion explains how games can promote learning archaeology. He correctly points to the question of game mechanics and how these are typically used in computer games. He asks us to question what a digital archaeology game should consist of if it is to teach us something, and offers a way to achieve this goal, by proposing a framework within which teachers and students can find, relate, annotate and modify existing 3D models, while exploring the usage of these models with the help of suitable game mechanics.

The joint article by the VALUE Foundation (Boom et al.) shows that video games can be used to teach about the past in a critical, yet fun way, allowing for a deep level of personal and historical learning. Through four case studies, the authors show us how this happens in practice: they used video games to present complicated archaeological topics in the classroom, show us how to use video streaming to not only play but also discuss video games from an archaeological point of view, discuss how the software Twine creates interactive non-linear stories, and finally show us how the popular game Minecraft can help to engage with children and create a first contact with cultural heritage in a fun and creative way.

Xavier Rubio-Campillo gives a real-life example, as he directed the team that created a simulation game with archaeological content. This game allows the player to take the role of the leader of a hunter-gatherer group in different stages of human evolution and try to survive in different eras. He explains how the theme, lore, narrative and game mechanics enabled him to create a challenging and informative game that promotes the understanding of hominid evolution in the Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain.

The second part of this volume examines the topic of learning in the museum. Museums have a long-standing tradition of disseminating knowledge as one of their key functions (Walz 2016: 9). As institutions, they are also changing with the advent of new technologies and interests of the public (Walz 2016: 40-75). Archaeological parks and open-air museums are already an example of this (Walz 2016: 93-103). Nowadays, modern digital tools are being tested and employed to create interactive spaces, engage people of different ages, enhance the experience for impaired visitors and create spaces for polyvocality (Arrigoni & Galani 2019). Engaging with visitors is different from teaching in a classroom and the contributions in this section not only present a whole range of different ways of doing so but also discuss pitfalls and challenges.

Anna Riethus shows us how playing an audio app game during a museum visit can create an inclusive museum experience. Her development of the NMsee app game combines an interactive story with tactile exhibits within the permanent exhibition of the Neanderthal Museum. This innovative approach offers both seeing and visually impaired visitors an audio-tactile way to experience the past that is more immersive than before.

Introduction 5

Stephan Quick offers a way to use digital media in an open-air archaeological park and how this aids in experiencing the Roman past. Virtual reconstructions at the exhibition reveal the monumentality of the site as it once was. The response to these elaborate visualisations is positive throughout all target groups.