Archaeological sites and artifacts all over the world face rapid decline; they are at high risk, and under threat, due to urbanization, conflicts, wars, and tourism. The archaeological ruins are not only data, but also a set of perceptual spatial and topological relations, together forming the inherent historical information. Traditionally, archeologists impose an order on these ruins by recognizing an object, and by describing it scientifically.

In this domain, a question arises: Is it possible to develop a digital (software) agent to perform archaeology? This excellent book offers some possible answers to this question (chapters 1 and 2), and investigates what it means to define the new artificial intelligence-based era in archaeology (chapters 3 and 4).

Archaeology is traditionally supported by classical architectural recordings (photography, drawings, plans, sections, and so on) and recently, in the last two decades, by declarative geometry three-dimensional (3D) model-based digital or virtual reconstructions and geographic information system (GIS) based cultural information systems with embedded spatial functionality. The first two chapters of the book are related to these approaches. In chapters 1 and 2, the proposed software agent is described first as an a priori causal model of supporting questions on how, when, and where social action modifies matter in some specific ways, and, second, as a notion of distance between the goal to be attained (the cause) and the current excavated state (the observation).

But, the global complexity of the observation (excavated objects, artifact parts) is not well supported, even using today’s available digital documentation techniques and technologies. The author states that such a declarative methodology (with some pre-fixed plans and well-defined operators for searching operations in restricted pre-defined knowledge databases) cannot sufficiently account for further cognitive processes, because it neglects their creative (constructive) aspects.

The fundamentally unrepeatable nature of everyday life and human existence, which is well described in the text (chapter 1), gives reality a significance that cannot be understood in terms of pre-defined and well-structured declarative or/and closed-form expressions. Hence, the following two chapters, 3 and 4, address incorporating perception into archaeology (the new artificial intelligence-based era in archaeology); these chapters were written to show that it is possible to define a digital agent for archaeology that is able to learn archaeology powered with cognitive functionality (e-learning digital archaeology).

Both approaches presented in the book--the declarative (model-based) and the perceptual (cognitive)--are based on Plato’s philosophy that knowledge exists before experience.

The remaining five chapters, 5 to 9, discuss well-defined application examples of the proposed digital archaeology agent, rather than just some computer-aided design (CAD) and GIS computer applications in archaeology. In these chapters, the reader will find case studies concerning rock art, lithic tools, archaeozoology, pottery analysis, remote sensing, ancient settlement investigations, funerary rituals (religious services and ceremonies), and social organizations in prehistoric societies.

This excellent book is essential reading for those people (archaeologists, architects, curators, cultural heritage managers, information technology (IT) scientists, students in architecture and archaeology, and e-tourists) interested in cultural heritage, those wishing to understand the cutting-edge key debates in “new (digital) archaeology,” and those who want to appraise the limitless growing innovations, affordances, and improvements of digital technologies applied to archaeology.