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Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies

University of Arkansas

Visualizing the Roman City

Home » Research » Visualization/Animation » Visualizing the Roman City

Ostia Antica was the primary port for the city of Imperial Rome. While Pompeii may be more famous, the ruins of Ostia are extraordinarily well preserved and provide a amazingly detailed window into the structure, details and architecture of a time and place separated from today by two millennia. While the ruins are exceptional and extensive they are, nonetheless, ruins and thus are an attenuated representation of the city.  What did Ostia look like, how was it experienced 2,000 years ago?

With "start-up" funding from the University of Arkansas Honors College, faculty from Architecture, Anthropology, Classics and Geosciences have created an undergraduate course that addresses how we "visualize" the past, using the city of Ostia as its test case. In spring 2007 a team spent two weeks using long range and close range laser scanners and photogrammetric methods to document much of the existing site. In the Fall of 2007, using this data and other resources, the first class taking the course focused on understanding and "re-creating" the Capitolium, a temple honoring the Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. For the spring semester of the course,they focused on commercial and residential portions of the city the urban texture of this neighborhood, including practical questions (such as Roman design principles and construction techniques) and more theoretical issues (the vocabulary of space and its relation to social hierarchy and the body). The class will also addressed "visualization" itself: what motivates the move toward 3D visualization in archaeology? How and why is a given visualization considered successful? How does academic visualization compare with representations of Rome in popular culture.

More details on the scanning is available on the Ostia Antica 3D Scanning Project website and details on the photogrammetry can be found at Photogrammetry at Ostia Antica. A paper was presented on the class at the April 2008 Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference in Budapest. The presentation is here. A flyer advertising the Fall 2008 class is also available

An earlier class offered in the Classics department looked at a single Roman "home" (or domus) from Pompeii. Its web page can be seen here.

In 2008 Dr Dave Fredrick and his students began the Digital Pompeii project. The goal of the project is

The Digital Pompeii Project will create a 3D database of Pompeian painting, using design, database, and visualization software.  The database will be searchable, and navigable in real time; users will be able to view search results on a 2D map of Pompeii, and then explore each instance of a given subject or theme in a 3D environment.    

You can visit the Digital Pompeii site at pompeii.uark.edu/classwebsite/Site/Welcome.html