How do archaeologists work? A multimedia digital object to learn their investigation process

The aim of the CHAT ("Cultural Heritage fruition & e-learning applications of new Advanced (multimodal) Technologies") research project was to provide on smartphones context-sensitive multimedia services accessible through several interaction modalities. The multimedia content of such services was implemented as Digital Objects managed by the Fedora web service. In this paper, we present a multimedia digital object that, through images, videos, 3D reconstructions, sounds, informs people about the scientific value of the archaeological investigation and about the complexity of the overall archaeological research process. Archaeologists follow a rigorous method, called stratigraphic excavation, to reconstruct the past civilizations lifestyles. People tend to think that the archaeologist work consists only in the excavation and research of valuable elements, while it has its scientific rigor. By exploiting the CHAT infrastructure, the multimedia digital object about the archaeologist work can be accessed in difTerent context on several devices