When Venice features in the media, the story is usually about the malign consequences of flooding, cruise ships, and tourism, which crowds out more positive news, like the development of the Venice Time Machine, due to be showcased at this year’s European Association of Archaeologists conference in Rome. This is the first product of a hugely ambitious European Commission project that aims to bring together every bit of digital data that currently exists to help us understand the entire history of Europe, no less. The scheme is dressed up in lots of flowery language, with charts purporting to show how it will all work (see http://www.timemachine.eu/about-us/ if you really want to know), but the developers of the Time Machine have wisely chosen to begin with the small and well-defined fragment of the European continent that is the Venetian archipelago. We will see whether this is ever scaled up to cover the entirety of Europe.
Time Machine Venice is just one of many such projects that are trying to harness the power of AI and supercomputers to bring together large and disparate datasets to tell a more holistic story about the historic environment – in simple terms, showing how the world has evolved and changed over time. Another such development is the Archaeological Atlas of France, published by Inrap, the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research, in November 2023. The Atlas consists of 100 maps synthesising thousands of finds, surveys, and excavations, starting with the migration of Homo sapiens into what is now France. It then traces their first artistic works, and ends with the marks left by the violence of the two World Wars and the post-War history of colonial and overseas France.
Each map represents a slice of time through France’s past, and is accompanied by analytical commentary, photographs, and artistic reconstructions of landscapes representing thousands of years of human occupation and activity. Or, as Inrap President Dominique Garcia put it, ‘the invisible heritage beneath our feet’. One map, for example, shows the distribution of ports, settlements, and finds (including tin, amber, wine amphorae, and ornaments) that constitute the evidence for 7th-century BC trade networks.
