Abstract
The careful excavation of physical evidence and examination of contexts and provenance allow us to make informed hypotheses about the physical construction and location of past structures, but is it possible to inform our understandings of how people moved around and through these structures? Is there any manner in which we can use the same physical evidence to infer how these structures were used? Can we apply understandings of how human perception informed past people about the meanings of environmental objects? Can we apply elements of Experimental Archaeology in an attempt to replicate past processes? Can we borrow from J. J. Gibson’s theories of affordance or direct-perception, where objects and events have inherent meaning detected and exploited by human beings without mental calculation to aid our understanding of Past Places? Do ecological approaches to embodiment and cognition help us to understand relationships between past peoples, their tools, their environments, and how all of these elements function together as a system? If human movements, or moving humans, are added to heritage reconstructions without consideration of how environment, artifact, perception, and action are linked, they become aesthetic adornments. However, if movement is captured and applied with rigour similar to that applied to the materials used for the reconstructions, the virtual models become more than sculptures and can more usefully reflect the activities and behaviours conjectured to have taken place in the location.