A World Heritage site always attracts a lot of attention. Such archaeological sites are viewed to materially represent irreplaceable ‘heritage’ on a global scale and are defined and protected through the United Nations’ UNESCO declarations (eg. UNESCO 1988). Teotihuacan, Mexico is no exception.

Replete with two monumental pyramids (the Pyramid of the Sun being the 3rd largest Pyramidal structure in the world) set amidst the ruins of a once densely populated, urbanized city (the first of its kind in Mesoamerica), “Teotihuacan”, or the “city of the gods” as the Aztec later identified it in Nahuatl, has attracted, both historically and contemporaneously, a broad range of interests. As most of us may personally attest to in visiting these world monuments, such interests run the gamut from the archaeological

to new age spiritualism.

Working at Teotihuacan, I often heard the phrase ‘yahoos’ being used to refer to the unsanctioned, occult practitioners who regularly gather at the site for their rituals.
Enter , the billion dollar, international internet company based in the Silicon Valley of California. To celebrate the media giant’s 15th anniversary, Yahoo! announced that it would create a ‘time capsule’ to gather together a snap shot of contemporary human life. Beginning this past October 10th, the search firm began collecting text, audio-visual and video contributions from any and all interested parties worldwide – estimated in analog terms to represent about 5 million books worth of data (OCRegister 2006). These would be uploaded via the internet.

This media-bundling was then digitized and beamed into space via laser a few months ago on October 25th. Following in the original steps of the affable ‘yahoo’ Carl Sagan, this digital ‘time capsule’ was made in hopes of communicating to digitally attuned extraterrestrials the diversity of life and culture on Earth. As a spokesperson for Yahoo! stated: the purpose was to join the “past and present with the universe’s potential future by sharing today’s culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away” (Subzeroblue 2006).
A ‘hard copy’ of the time capsule will be buried on the Sunnyvale grounds of the corporate offices. But, in keeping with the ethos of ‘digital democracy’ inherent in the conception and content of the Time Capsule Project, the company wanted to laser the digitized information in real-time at a prominent locale. You guessed it. This Yahoo! chose the top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

 The reasoning for this was as follows: “We have this incredible ancient site and from that site we can project contemporary content,” Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo!’s editor in chief, told Reuters. “What is new is the ability to capture this information in such scale” (CNN 2006). Their announcement to do so added more fodder for commentators in the ‘blogosphere’. In fact, events transpired so quickly that only the news blogs seem capable of updating the developments. While the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), the Mexican government’s cultural heritage managers, initially granted permission for the time capsule project, they announced just two weeks before the digital gala that permission to go ahead had been rescinded. A representative of INAH told Yahoo that the event “posed technical and operational problems that might damage Teotihuacan.” “We are the guardians of the heritage of Mexico,” the representative said. And the laser installation on the pyramid, combined with the real-time web-cast of the event’s participants gathered at the site, would pose adverse effects to the archaeological structure (News.com 2006). The message was: not one more ‘yahoo’ at Teotihuacan – even if this one brings international publicity and millions in potential pesos as revenue for the Valley of Teotihuacan and its businesses.
Yet what Yahoo! was not aware of was the current furor over international corporations stepping into the local Mexican valley and disrupting the economies and traditional lifeways of the five adjacent pueblos. Wal-Mart had just muscled economic leverage at the national level to open a store within the protected boundary of the site – just 2km from the Pyramid of the Sun.

Protests, riots, hunger fasts and vandalism had upstaged the archaeological site and its pyramids for the entirety of the end of 2004. And INAH (and other government officials) had been branded by heritage-minded Mexicans as a traitor in selling itself out to the interests of transnational corporations. Damage was in fact done to subsurface structures in the process of laying the foundation for the superstore. This time INAH had to stick to the letter of the law (DII-IA-I, sección 10 del SNTE 1983) and avoid local ire, particularly as these statutes are currently being rewritten to incorporate wider societal input (INAH 2005). While a brief montage of the web-like politics encapsulating archaeology at Teotihuacan, the short of it: politics of manifesting and managing the past go all the way to bedrock.
Back to Yahoo!. The digitized time capsule did successfully find a place to beam its media into space: Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico.

Happening just a few months ago (October 25-27th), you can still view the web-casts from the live, two-day event online. It was not an insignificant, techy-only event either: an estimated 2.5 million people from over 200 nations watched and participated in this “electronic anthropology archive” (marketwire 2006). (There is even a parallel three-dimensional event in secondlife for virtual participation). But not to worry, you can still contribute your digital media to the physical capsule: link.

Jerry Yang, co-founder and Chief Yahoo! draws out the salient points I want to lead from in this vignette about Yahoo!’s development of the collaborative digital archive as a memory practice par excellence: “In just a few short weeks, thousands of people around the world have uploaded memories and ideas they want to preserve, creating an important anthropological collection that documents this moment in time.” (Webpronews 2006). Unsurprisingly, I think there is an important trend-setting agenda that this hugely successful media mogul is leading. Specifically, it is a media movement which transcends popular culture and academic practices. And it is directly relevant, perhaps now more than ever, for archaeology. This is the utilization and diffusion of participatory media that is rapidly reconfiguring the old infrastructure of ‘Web 1.0’ with what has been loosely described as ‘Web 2.0’.

To be sure, this has become a buzzword. But what is key is that it entails a ‘platform-shift’ which has valences with and facilitates the paradigm-shift occurring in archaeology at world heritage sites such as Teotihuacan. What these shifts entail in both senses is the democratization of participation. So, Web 2.0 relies upon non-hierarchical networks of individuals and technologies collaboratively determining both form and content of what’s on-line. Two quick examples should help clarify what this involves. Compare an encyclopedia, either an analog Britannica or Britannica on-line, to Wikipedia. The first selects entries from experts, edits and publishes the results. Form and content are set. This in distinction to wikipedia that relies upon radical trust in allowing anyone with internet access to post new entries and edit existing entries. The content organically grows; even the form of the ‘skin’ of information in wikipedia may be modified. The first offers a product; the second a service. Additionally, allowing for the costs of being on-line, the first costs; the second is free.
This leads to the second example of the distinction. Software products or packages (such as Microsoft or Adobe) offer entire informational frameworks to operate within – and at a cost. The parameters are set for how users may engage with information – indeed, monopolizing how users may engage with information set the stage for the infamous battling software ‘actors’ and their lawsuits of the 1990’s. As opposed to these market share products, ‘open source software’ involves individuals generating freely distributed software services catering to specific needs. For the ‘open source initiative’ manifesto, open source software should (amongst other stipulations): allow modification and free re-distribution; must not restrict who software is distributed to or how it is applied (eg. business applications versus genetic research applications); must not restrict use of other software or be specific to particular software interfaces; and licensing agreements must extend to all redistributions (OSI 2006). So to bring it back to Yahoo!, Yahoo! offers services not a software product – principally it offers searching and server hosting services.
And the company’s time capsule exemplifies the ethos of this Web 2.0 digital democracy. The capsule was participatory media in a reinforcing sense: the media used allowed for rapid, inclusive and distributed participation – size constraints alone would not have allowed for the physical accumulation of analog information; and this widespread participation co-created a media rich manifestation of ‘the human condition’ – again not possible, even for the intrepid Carl Sagan, to assemble in analog . As a memory practice, the digital time capsule manifests much more of the experiential human condition for future generations to un-forget the past – and hopefully turn a sympathetic eye(s)? and/or ear(s)? of Sagan’s extraterrestrials.
But this new digital technology and infrastructure is no informational or political panacea. (Indeed, ‘intellipedia’, or a wiki utilized by the various intelligence gathering agencies of the US government, has just gone into operation as the elusive solution to the current administration’s efforts to accelerate information gathering and sharing; San Francisco Chronicle, November 1, 2006). Much is collected – but much still slips by.
For instance, if the laser had launched from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, what would have been rendered of the local human condition – of those watching the laser show from the surrounding pueblos? Unfortunately very little. The content still remained largely confined to a few nations in Europe, North America and East Asia. This has been quite common for the history of Teotihuacan and other sites of the public imagination. The archaeological is valued for anchoring memory practice. For instance, Yahoo! could quite have easily lasered its capsule from the apex of the Luxor pyramid in Las Vegas – which was in fact suggested. But there was a felt need to convey longevity; perhaps because the past is nostalgically viewed as the antithesis to the media-driven acceleration of the present. Local denizens, however, are generally seen only as informants for archaeological narratives; or more often than not, seen as dissonance for archaeology producing its un-forgetting of these places. Yet these sites do not exist in an ‘ecological’ vacuum.
And as Yahoo! demonstrated, the capacity to manifest more, to not let slip by in the digital sieve, is widely and cheaply available for archaeologists. At Teotihuacan I began a project two years ago in collaboration with INAH and the five local pueblos to bring forward much more of the ‘heritage’, much more of the memory, of this mainstay of the archaeological imaginary by using such Web 2.0 ‘social software’ – indeed, by using the type of media you are engaging with right now. My attempt has been to collaboratively build from the ground-up an ethnographic case-study of the various associations between residents of the valley and the material of the site (Webmoor forthcoming). Like the contributions to Yahoo!’s project, the digital technology of the Teotihuacan Project increases functionality in three key ways: 1) richer media capture – eg. audio and video, as well as digitized text and images 2) greater collaboration – both in determining content and in commentary 3) distributed and ‘universal’ retrieval.
As I stated before, such functionality is not simply the take-up of the shift to Web 2.0 principles and technologies. For archaeology there is a dire need of digitizing databases and for co-creating cultural heritage (UNESCO 2001, Kintigh 2006, Nicholas and Bannister 2004, Smith 2004, Vogt-O’Connor 2000). The first need involves preserving and, most importantly, providing longevity for access to archaeological information. The second is the move to incorporate the ‘external mandates’ from non-archaeological groups to participate in archaeology’s memory practices; and, most critically, is the way forward to mitigate against such groups foreclosing access to archaeological information under the potential application of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR’s). Wikis are an ideal software platform to service both of these needs. Like the time capsule, wikis enable the collaborative manifestation of a wide range of information. They even track, or archive, this process of co-creation. Secondly, they provide an easy user-interface with search capabilities for creating digital databases. (The real issue now and in the future for archived digital information is server longevity; see Kintigh 2006.) And importantly, such databases and their wide array of information are easily accessible. Together, these functionalities should obviate the need to apply IPR’s on the part of local and indigenous groups to archaeological information. Collaboratively made from the ‘ground-up’, the extension of IPR’s to the products of archaeological practice would fall more properly under non-restrictive Creative Commons type of licensing, rather than restrictive Copyright, Patent or Trademark. To be sure, these are a host of complex issues to be sorted out, and I am not suggesting wikis on their own will serve as the be-all to end-all. But these very issues have already been confronted and creative solutions are already being worked out in the private, technology sector.
So rather than parochially insisting upon archaeologically derived solutions to archaeological problems, the discipline ought to take part in the encompassing, trans-disciplinarian sensibility which extends from the Silicon Valley to the Teotihuacan Valley. When we think of manifesting the past, archaeology should indeed take the ‘Yahoos’ of the world seriously.

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