What if the past is a simulation?

Abstract

This article proposes a critical reading of archaeological simulation as a constitutive condition of knowledge about the past. Its central hypothesis is straightforward: the archaeological past never reaches the present as immediate presence; it arrives through traces, gaps, classifications, analogies, images, narratives, technologies, and disciplinary assumptions. In this sense, archaeology has always worked through forms of simulation, long before the emergence of digital environments. Plans, stratigraphic sections, typologies, maps, reconstructions, museum displays, and historical narratives organize possible worlds from material fragments. Cyberarchaeology does not inaugurate this condition; it makes it visible, navigable, and critically debatable. Drawing on the Romariz 3D case study and the installation Archaeological Simulation, the article analyzes the passage from the archaeological trace to the digital environment, distinguishing among the three-dimensional model, reconstruction, simulation, virtual reality, and experience. In dialogue with cyberarchaeology, archaeogaming, post-processual archaeological theory, Foucauldian archival critique, and the principles of transparency in virtual archaeology, it argues that archaeological simulation matters less as a final image of the past than as a space of interpretive dispute. Its contribution lies in exposing choices, uncertainties, technical assumptions, and regimes of visibility. To simulate the past, in this sense, is not to escape materiality, but to make explicit the conditions through which materiality becomes intelligible, experienceable, and socially recognized.