The British explorer George Dennis once wrote, "Vulci is a city whose very name … was scarcely remembered, but which now, for the enormous treasures of antiquity it has yielded, is exalted above every other city of the ancient world." He's correct in assuming that most people do not know where or what Vulci is, but for explorers and historians—including Duke's Bass Connections team Smart Archaeology—Vulci is a site of enormous potential.
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The team at work in Vulci [Credit: Duke Research Blog] |
As a dig site, Vulci is extremely valuable for the information it can give us about the Etruscan and Roman civilizations—especially since the ruins found at Vulci date back beyond the 8th century B.C.E. On November 20th, Professor Maurizio Forte, of the Art, Art History and Visual Studies departments at Duke as well as Duke's Dig@Lab, led a talk and interactive session. He summarized the Smart Archaeology teams' experience this past summer in Italy as well as allowing audience members to learn about and try the various technologies used by the team. With Duke being the first university with a permit of excavation for Vulci in the last 60 years, the Bass Connections team set out to explore the region, with their primary concerns being data collection, data interpretation, and the use of virtual technology.
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An example of one of the maps created by the team [Credit: Duke Research Blog] |
So what did the team accomplish? Well, technology was a huge driving force in most of the data collected. For example, with the use of drones, photos taken from an aerial view were patched together to create bigger layout pictures of the area that would have been the city of Vulci. The computer graphics created by the drone pictures were also used to create a video and aided in the process of creating a virtual reality simulation of Vulci. VR can be an important documentation tool, especially in a field as ever-changing as archaeology. And as Professor Forte remarked, it's possible for anyone to see exactly what the researchers saw over the summer—and "if you're afraid of the darkness of a cistern, you can go through virtual reality instead."
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Processed image of Vulci [Credit: Katherine McCusker and the Smart Archaeology team] |
One of the biggest takeaways from the data the team collected based on discovering remnants of infrastructure and layout of the city was of the Etruscan mastery of water, developing techniques that the Romans also used. More work was also done on classification of Etruscan pottery, tools, and materials based on earlier work done by previous researchers. Discovering decorative and religious artifacts was also impactful for the team, because as Professor Forte emphasized, these objects are the "primary documentation of history."
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The team at work in Vulci [Credit: Duke Research Blog] |
Author: Meghna Datta | Source: Duke Research Blog, Duke University [December 10, 2019]
* This article was originally published here
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