Communicating in Three Dimensions: Questions of Audience and Reuse in 3D Excavation Documentation Practice

Summary

After excavating the Praedia of Iulia Felix at Pompeii in 1755, architect Karl Weber published the building with an axionometric illustration that showed the remains in three-dimensional perspective. In doing so, Weber communicated additional information about the form of the building in a manner that was both accessible to a lay audience and sufficiently "scientific" for a scholarly one. By contrast, digital 3D documentation methods in current archaeological practice often reinforce a division between "scientific" models intended for internal consumption by the project that produces them, and public communication in the form of lower-quality online digital displays. Using recent fieldwork at the Greek colonial site of Histria in Romania as a case-study, this paper explores the space between high-quality 3D documentation used only by an internal audience and decontextualized 3D content designed for public consumption. In particular, we seek to determine whether high-quality, measurable 3D models derived from photogrammetrical capture are useful in communicating excavation results to other scholars – and if so, in what ways. We evaluate several scenarios for the role of high-quality 3D documentation in both formal and informal scholarly communication, and we discuss the potential for the reuse of such documentation to answer new research questions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21944