538 Tourism Technologies and Creating an Archaeotourism Destination: Digital to Physical Hasan Ali Erdogan Tourism Guidance - Faculty of Tourism Necmettin Erbakan University Abstract Technology today has an active place in all areas of our lives. Information and communication technology is a good example with its widespread expression in the tourism industry. Technology is mostly conceived to provide communication between product or service producers and their consumers. Specialized sources of secondary data from technology and tourism papers indexed mainly in Scopus around the theme of tourism have been studied and the theoretical framework has been structured in terms of archaeological tourism. In the fourth industrial revolution, while its most prominent features in information and communication technology in the form of artificial intelligence, cyber-physical systems, big data, robotics, internet of things, and smart tourism have developed at a bewildering pace, the technological potential of archaeotoursim and its capacity to commence a new paradigm shift in the tourism industry is mostly neglected. Most of the studies regard technology as an auxiliary tool to serve for the developments in tourism destinations in one way or another. This theoretical paper conceptualizes the role of up-to-date technology in facilitating archaeotoursim experiences through adopting it as a reference for bringing tangible archaeological heritage to everyone’s home with its unique interpretation by archaeologists at the excavation sites. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the gaps and offer the rethinking of the archaeotoursim framework proposing a new level of efficiency; digital archaeotourism via re- engineering of main organizational and operational processes to create a form where technology itself forms e-destinations. Keywords: digital tourism, e-destination, digital archaeotourism, a new paradigm shift Introduction Technology use (TU) has received remarkable attention from the literature over the last decades as it has stepped in all the ways in our daily life (Ballina et al., 2019). During the pandemic with the new normal such as stay indoor orders and obligation to shop online, information and communication technology (ICT) has involved in all spheres of individuals’ social lives. The situation has been triggered to such an extent that ICT has now a significant role to determine individuals’ level of perception towards the outside world as well as the individualistic relationships in societies. It manipulates the way people behave, so the majority of people react in line with what the websites or mobile phones dictate (Fan et al., 2019). Apart from daily lives, COVID-19 has already critically affected two major areas; (1) education (from preschool to PhD levels), which is maintained online in most countries, where teachers and students meet in home University of South Florida M3 Center Publishing https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/m3publishing/vol16/iss9781955833004/1 DOI: 10.5038/9781955833004