Reconstructing Invisible Ancient Cities

Most ancient cities in the Mediterranean show little above ground to testimony hundreds or even a thousand years of town life. It would take centuries to excavate even small parts of them, and today heritage legislation prohibits such intervention unless the city is at risk of modern destruction. As a result of these factors archaeologists have been developing methods to reconstruct ancient settlements based on surface exploration. Systematic surface surveys allow field archaeologists to collect a huge quantity of data in a relatively short amount of time. To process these data, however, is a time consuming procedure. Also, to organise them in a coherent and meaningful form that can be presented both to specialists and to the general public is a challenging task. This presentation will deal with these topics and will introduce the applications that CEEDS is exploring to better handle large archaeological datasets and to visualise them in innovative ways.