DIGITAL CITIES Between History and Archaeology

TMA66, 2022

Het Tijdschrift voor Mediterrane Archeologie is een onafhankelijk tijdschrift dat aandacht besteedt aan actueel archeologisch onderzoek in de mediterrane wereld, in het bijzonder verricht vanuit Nederland en België. Bijdragen van lezers kunnen al dan niet verkort door de redactie worden geplaatst. TMA werkt met single blind peer review. TMA verschijnt twee keer per jaar. Opgave kan schriftelijk of via onze website. Een abonnement kost €20,-. Studenten betalen €15,-(onder vermelding van studentnummer). Het abonnement loopt van 1 januari tot en met 31 december en wordt automatisch verlengd, tenzij een maand van tevoren schriftelijk is opgezegd.

In discussions on urbanism, the need to involve new actors has been a major theme of recent debate. In this field, throughout Europe, various ways of allowing citizens to take a more direct part in planning is stressed. It is also important to look at the role or lack of role played by particular research fields. Architecture plays a major role in city planning. While archaeology has become increasingly involved in field projects in urban environments, the discipline seldom plays an important role in city planning. The digital tools for documenting and designing have changed the approach to many procedures and have created new figures involved in the process of facing architecture and archaeology. In several countries and particular cities this situation has been questioned during the last decades. In Sweden, certain studies indicate an increased interest in an active involvement of archaeology from the part of individual municipalities and provincial governments, and even on the state level in certain cases. In France, Lavendhomme at Inrap has discussed various possible new kinds of uses of archaeology in the planning process, and similar discussions start to appear in other countries. In the UK, archaeologists are increasingly involved in mitigating heritage impacts of building projects at the design stage rather than during construction (excavating). To take just one example, in Sweden the archaeologist Stefan Larsson has developed a project with the municipality of Kalmar, in which city planners, architects and archaeologists collaborate in making suggestions for a city plan in a segment of the city. In this workshop we will focus on possible new ways of collaboration between architects and archaeologists. With a particular stress over the intelligent use of digital solution for documenting, designing and representing the contest and the new ideas. We wish to open a new kind of communication between these research fields and related praxis. The possible contributions from archaeology include questions of conservation, diffusion of archaeological knowledge by different means, but also other fields, including practical knowledge on the development of particular districts over time, general knowledge in comparative studies of urbanism, questions of design or questions of “gestalt” in urban settings, and the intersections between archaeology, architecture and public art. Last but not least the topic of the communication, which in our time is something totally linked to the digital media. We hope this workshop will help to open this field, and that it will be followed by other scholarly meetings on more limited particular cases and questions and, potentially, by a larger conference building on the workshop’s outcomes. Pablo Rodriguez Navarro, Giorgio Verdiani, Per Cornell

Journal of Urban Archaeology 3, 2021

Since 2017, excavations have taken place on Caesar’s Forum in Rome. The area holds archaeological evidence covering three thousand years of Rome’s prehistory and historical periods. The excavations offer wide-ranging research possibilities connected to the urban development of one of the classical world’s pivotal city centres. However, the location’s centrality also offers challenges when transforming the vast bulk and complex nature of the archaeological data into scientific publications, while also making the results accessible to the public. This article presents results from the first excavation phases within a best-practice Open Data strategy embedded into the project from its outset. The applied methods and techniques ensure that traditional, analogue scientific publications are supplemented with online access to the excavation’s raw data, high-resolution illustrations, and 3-D reconstructions obtained through laser scans and photogrammetry.

We will address in this paper the digital tools specific to the Web 2.0, as HIS and virtual and augmented reality, and the question of how to adapt them to History. Digital tools and the internet offer new opportunities to renew our trade as historians. They provide tools to map the historical events, because they are an exceptionally suited instrument to "visualize" the non-linear order in which social memory is organized. They also facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue, particularly with Geography. Moreover, they supply us with an accurate way to disseminate our research at low cost, and to take teaching outside the classroom, through city walks. With regard to research, HIS house potentialities in three fields. First, they allow to process a large number of information and written and visual documents: its geo-referencing, permanent updating, visualization, manipulation and modeling, and access on plane. They also allow us to interrelate independently constructed databases, to articulate them with those new databases we develop from the documentation, and geo-referencing them in a common matrix. Finally, HIS help us to manage in a decentralized way large and dispersed work teams. As for the difficulties, our HIS have usually been designed on the working requirements of other professional collectives such as geographers: they treat as imprecision the high levels of uncertainty that historians use to accept as inevitable. Problems also arise from the difficulty of interacting with computer programs that are not always part of our curriculum, and with technicians whose skills we do not dominate. Sometimes minimum standards between the programs and protocols used by the different research teams are absent, in contrast with the standardization that dominates most of the historiographical tasks. As for visualization through websites, an additional risk lays in the commercial policies of global corporations. We will review some twenty different projects: trying not an exhaustive inventory, but rather giving priority to those ones we are familiar with, particularly when we had the opportunity to discuss them with their authors.

2014

The introduction of new information and communication technologies for the documentation, cataloguing, analysis and interpretation of the built heritage offers the possibility to integrate traditional investigations with new research dynamics and to propose useful solutions in the various research stages. It represents a support for the experimentation and the application of methods that involve multidisciplinary skills, which find in this context the possibility for integration. Research that targets historical studies using new information and communication technologies continues to develop worldwide. This discussion is on the transformations introduced by the introduction of digital tools and methods in the urban domain of historical research. Over the last decades, urban historians have acknowledged the benefits of digital techniques for describing and analysing urban heritage content in its various forms. The “spatial” approach to urban history has grown stronger as well, also ...

Geospatial World Forum 2018, 17 - 19 January 2018, Hyderabad, India - Proceedings, 2018

Digital archival of the geographical context of the historic past is one of the most important applications of spatial technology. It not only adds a new dimension to the documentation, it also creates a foundation for 3D visualisation. This project is aimed at creating a walk-through experience of medieval era Pune, a city in India with a current population exceeding three million. Its implementation in a GPS-enabled mobile device simulates a Google maps-like navigation experience through the historic city. The overlay of historic landscape on the present day city creates a composite picture of the past and the present. Part of this mapping is transformed into 3D visualisations. Although paper maps are information-rich to begin with, there is still scope to augment them by adding additional features and attributes in both space and time. In addition to this data collected for the project, more information is expected to be gathered through crowd-sourcing. The mobile app is built with this requirement in mind. This enables the collection of data that is often passed through generations as folklore and, when presented suitably, enriches the total experience of the user. The current sources of information include maps, gazetteer volumes, survey reports and books. The historical period covered ranges from the early 18th century to the late 19th century, a period ruled by the Peshwa dynasty. The data collected for the project reveals the exemplary planning and public utility work done by the royal dynasty. Finally, the project demonstrates how open source technologies can be used to great advantage in developing countries for presenting and preserving digital heritage cost effectively.

Proceedings of the 2013 Digital Heritage International Congress (Vol. 2), 2013

The urban body is never at rest, the changing needs and desires of inhabitants in the presentwith an eye to possible futurescontinually shaping, and being shaped by, the urban fabric of the past. No single narrative can capture this ongoing negotiation between place and people; it must be understood as a plurality of narratives bound into the urban body. In this paper we will we present 'Digital Cities', a multi-disciplinary, crossuniversity collaborative undergraduate course exploring the use of new tools, techniques and methods from digital and spatial research in the mediation of historical material culture and the built environment. We will argue that such platforms can enrich and diversify the possibilities for digital storytelling within scholarly, educational and creative settings, both within and outside of academia.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

The archaeological site of Mystras, located in western Laconia, is the best-preserved Byzantine site in Greece also known as the "Castle City of Mystras" (Odysseus). Mystras was founded in 1249 by the Frank commander William II of Villehardouin who built a castle fortress on top of Myzithra hill on his return from the conquest of the Castle of Monemvasia. The castle fortress overlooked the Valley of Evrota 6km southwest of Sparta creating a control point for his regime. The city passed to Byzantine rule in 1259 and expanded outside the Acropolis. Mystras eventually developed into the powerhouse of the Peloponnese, capital of the Despotate of Morea. The city flourished through a significant number of phases, different rulers and population changes (Sinos, 2009). This study aims to visualize the history of Mystras through a digital depiction of the different phases of the city providing a digital product where the archaeological data concerning the area of the Byzantine city are projected. Through the use of modern spatial technologies, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a GPS and ground control points, the area was photographed and georeferenced using photogrammetry software to provide a true orthophoto of the study area, which in turn, provide the base map for its subsequent analysis via Geographic Information System (GIS). The objective is to create a temporal and spatial presentation of the evolution of the city while providing additional data such as population fluctuations, structural elements, ecclesiastical and secular buildings as well as fortifications available to researchers. With the digital depiction of the evolution of the urban fabric, the narration of the history of the city itself begins, highlighting the contribution of digital technologies in Cultural Heritage Management.

In discussions on urbanism, the need to involve new actors has been a major theme of recent debate. In this eld, throughout Europe, various ways of allowing citizens to take a more direct part in planning is stressed. It is also important to look at the role or lack of role played by particular research elds. Architecture plays a major role in city planning. While archaeology has become increasingly involved in eld projects in urban environments, the discipline seldom plays an important role in city planning. In several countries and particular cities this situation has been questioned during the last decades. In May 2015 a group of scholars from different countries met in Valencia to discuss about the relationship between Architecture, Archaeology and contemporary City Planning. This book collects the nal papers from that meeting.

2004