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To achieve this goal, an ARt-chaeological approach could provide a practical
solution to the problem, since the recovery of the immaterial heritage presents
itself as a process where representation is not operable all the time, and where the
augmentation created by art could fill the voids of information through a process of
art evocation.
The ARt-chaeological approach was applied to Vadastra rural community, to
recover their traditional and ancient immaterial heritage, helping it thus revitalise
the local arts and crafts, and to develop a participatory tourism. This strategy was
based on the exploitation of the possibilities of augmentation offered by IT portable
devices.
Vadastra is a village with a very rich stratigraphy, beginning with the Palaeolithic
and continuing up to the modern epoch. Since the most significant level of
dwelling is represented by the eponymous Chalcolithic culture, dating from the 5th
millennium B.C. (Mateescu
1978
), characterised by splendid tri-chrome ceramics
(Burghelea et al.
2001
), this level was chosen to exemplify the Time Maps'
viewpoint.
15.2
An Archaeological Fractal-Like Perspective
on the Past (From a Macro to a Micro Level)
15.2.1
Mapping and Mixing Up
Our opinion is that augmentation, which is a palimpsest-like process of overlapping
information, could also be creatively used under a fractal form. Fractals are
characterised by the fact that every detail unveils new ones (see Mandelbrot
1983
),
each detail being more important than the whole image (Mandelbrot interview, in
Albers and Alexanderson
2008
). In archaeology, a search for fractals was achieved
by Zubrow (
1985
)andBrownetal.(
2005
).
A difference between a classical fractal, where the observer “should envision
an infinite regression of smaller and smaller images that constitute a whole that
is similar to its parts” (Brown et al.
2005
: 40), and the one we propose is, in our
instance, that the detail- images (or “parts”) are icons different from the source-
image (or the “whole”), but their meaning augments the whole.
When one decomposes in a fractal way an archaeological complex (i.e., a
prehistoric settlement like Vadastra), this operation creates an immersive regressive
(Brown et al.
2005
: 40) trajectory (Benford and Giannachi
2011
: 230ff), where the
relations between parts and whole, and between real and virtual/immaterial, repeat
itself at different dimensional scales. From a semiotic point of view this trajectory
of the fractal-like decomposition of the whole into parts is an antinomy to that of the
functioning of Giambatista Vico's (
1744
: 129-31) rhetoric tropes. It is well known
that the basic tropes, synecdoche or metonymy, create the whole from fragments, the
part evoking the whole (Chandler
2007
: 123ff). In our approach to evoke the Past,
