Through an approach I term virtual literacy ethnography I study interactions around archaeology in a virtual world. While archaeology was the thematic topic for a small group meeting to study a simulated shipwreck and associated artefacts, it also provides me with methodological inspiration. Distanced from the participants in time and space, never learning their real identities, I draw upon various kinds of multimodal records in order to establish a necessarily partial account. Recent work in ethnographies of archaeology uncovers its practices as historically and culturally constructed, seeing in turn how engaging in those practices constructs participants as archaeologists. Examining diverse evidence to study a particular site of engagement, I explore the activities through which we crafted new practices and identities as virtual archaeologists.