ABSTRACT
The virtual heritage discipline needs to move beyond just using 3D images because they are cool; it must integrate the process and the evidence and the decisions. This chapter focuses on how archaeology has traditionally dealt with the evidence trail, with special focus on the use of images as documentation. It explores how digital archaeology has changed the rules and how the discipline is trying to cope. The chapter explains how virtual heritage projects can solve many problems relating to data trails, allowing researchers to compare the evidence to the outcome, and to have virtual worlds become visual indexes to all the information, and thus more than pretty pictures of the past. It discusses how the author's companies have handled some of these issues in projects. Historian David Staley, Executive Director of the American Association for History and Computing, wrote that computer visualization when used to represent simultaneity, multidimensionality, pattern and nonlinearity.
