As an undergraduate student at Occidental College in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I quickly realized that being a physicist was not how I wanted to spend my few short years on this planet. This meant that I would likely not achieve my dream of becoming an astronaut, but I certainly did not envision that I would trade outer space for cyberspace. Inspired by my freshman-year ‘Magic, Witchcraft, and the Occult’ class, I turned my attention toward anthropology and soon decided to focus on archaeology. I had recently seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, and figured this meant that I would be travelling to exotic lands and dodging giant boulders, deigning to occasionally grace the classroom to teach the next generation of daredevil archaeologists. Perhaps to ensure that I saw beyond the romance of archaeology, my archaeology professor, Dr Luanne Hudson, encouraged me to intern at the Southwest Museum. Here, I spent a semester working with Dr Paul Faulstich, who was curating a new exhibit hall devoted to California Indians. From Dr Faulstich I first learned the issues surrounding the communication of archaeology to the public. I found it particularly challenging to distil an artefact’s complex cultural associations into one or two short sentences that could be understood readily by people of all ages and reading abilities. Later, I became involved with public archaeology as the assistant laboratory director at the Alexandria Archaeology Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. Alexandria’s archaeology laboratory is filled with volunteer technicians, is freely open to visitors, and is situated amongst art galleries in a converted World War I torpedo factory. Despite these occasional forays into public archaeology, and a few while working for private archaeology firms, I assumed that any public archaeology efforts I undertook once I began teaching would be confined to sporadic summer field schools. All that changed when I established the Virtual Curation Laboratory (VCL) in August 2011.

中文翻译：

---

过去的数字护照：虚拟策展实验室的“意外”公共考古

作为 1980 年代洛杉矶西方学院的一名本科生，我很快意识到，成为一名物理学家并不是我想在这个星球上度过短短几年的方式。这意味着我可能无法实现成为宇航员的梦想，但我当然没有想到我会用外太空交换网络空间。受到大一“魔法、巫术和神秘学”课程的启发，我将注意力转向了人类学，并很快决定专注于考古学。我最近看了《夺宝奇兵》，认为这意味着我将前往异国他乡并躲避巨石，偶尔会屈尊在教室里教下一代胆大妄为的考古学家。也许是为了确保我看到的不仅仅是考古学的浪漫，我的考古学教授 Luanne Hudson 博士，鼓励我在西南博物馆实习。在这里，我与 Paul Faulstich 博士一起工作了一个学期，他正在策划一个专门展示加州印第安人的新展厅。从 Faulstich 博士那里，我第一次了解到围绕考古向公众传播的问题。我发现将一件文物的复杂文化关联提炼成一两个简短的句子尤其具有挑战性，这些句子可以被所有年龄段和阅读能力的人轻松理解。后来，我在弗吉尼亚州亚历山大市的亚历山大考古博物馆担任助理实验室主任，参与了公共考古学。亚历山大的考古实验室充满了志愿技术人员，对游客免费开放，坐落在第一次世界大战鱼雷工厂改建的艺术画廊中。尽管偶尔会涉足公共考古学，也有一些是在私人考古公司工作时，但我认为，一旦我开始教学，我所做的任何公共考古学工作都将仅限于零星的暑期田野学校。当我在 2011 年 8 月建立虚拟策展实验室 (VCL) 时，这一切都改变了。