Pompeii Cyberwalk Seeks to Reduce Visitor Damage to Pompeii

Apparently a collaboration of the University of Rome with cybernetic companies like the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ) and the Munich Technical University has produced a virtual Pompeii Cyberwalk using an omnidirectional treadmill:

The Institute of Conservation reports:

"Growing numbers of tourists and visitors can pose serious problems for many fragile historic sites. The conservation of valuable documents in archives has for some time increasingly depended on the creation of digital surrogate copies, but the challenges surrounding the creation of a digital surrogate of an entire ancient city have proved too daunting until now. This week, it will be possible for the first time to - literally - take a stroll around virtual Pompeii.

A stroll around Pompeii is not just virtual reality – it involves real walking. Instead of sitting at a computer looking at a virtual streetscape, the ‘visitor’ walks - or even runs - on a multidirectional treadmill. As they move naturally, a 3-D headset changes the visitor’s view of the Pompeii streets so they can literally walk around a city which has not existed for 2000 years.

The walk around Pompeii is possible thanks to an EU-funded collaboration between the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ), the University of Rome (La Sapienza), the Munich Technical University

Visitor numbers to heritage sites around the world continue to soar. It is expected that by 2020 there will be 1.6 billion international travellers per year, compared with 663 million in 1999. Over 16.5m Chinese tourists ventured abroad in 2002, twice as many as in 1998. The number of visitor to the Louvre rose from 5.6 million in 2001 to 8.35 million in 2006. In 2005 Angkor Wat received 1m visitors, Pompeii 2m, the Alhambra 2.2m and even Macchu Picchu has climbed well past 0.5m per year, growing at about 6% annually. If the world’s architectural heritage is not to be trampled flat by eager visitors, new ways have to be found of managing visitor numbers, and it is possible that a new generation of virtual reality experiences will have a part to play in this. It is not yet clear though whether high-tech encounters such as the Pompeii Cyberwalk will satisfy people’s desire for contact with the past – or whether they will just make the problem worse by stimulating their curiosity for ‘the real thing’ even further. "

There's a fascinating movie about the project at:

http://www.cyberwalk-project.org/img/Media/CyberWalk-o_ton.mov If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!

Astronomer Dates Caesar's Invasion of Britain

"Thank heaven for scientists who never mind their own business. Prof Donald Olson is an astronomer at Texas State University who has, for more than a decade, taken on a summer job as a historian. You may have heard him on Radio 4, delivering an update on his latest research: the date and place of Julius Caesar's momentous landing on the coast of Britain in 55 BC.

According to Olson, who reports on his intellectual adventures for Sky and Telescope magazine, there has always been an argument about quite when and where this happened. Caesar himself had no Ordnance Survey map, had sketchy local knowledge, and of course expected a lot of resentment from the locals. But he described, in book four of the Gallic Wars, the white cliffs of Dover, and a detour to find a more level playing field for the grim game ahead.

He did not give a precise date ("only a small part of the summer was left") but he was particular about the time he saw the hostile cliffs ("about the fourth hour of the day"), about how long he waited ("until the ninth hour"), and the distance he had to go ("about seven miles"). He also mentions, a bit later on, that on his fourth day in Britain as an illegal immigrant the cavalry reinforcements from Gaul were delayed by a storm, a full moon and an unusually high tide.

Such clues were enough to give scholars a crack at dating the invasion. Just as astronomers can predict future full moons, so they can confidently time them far in the past. So, they calculated, Caesar saw Dover but turned north-east and sailed around the South Foreland and landed at either Walmer or Deal on August 26 or 27. Latin scholars might have been happy with this conclusion, but hydrographers and astronomers were not; they calculated that the tides would be running the wrong way at the ninth hour of those days and take Caesar to the south-west.

So the team from Texas made the Julian date with destiny their summer assignment. They read all the texts, checked the tidal patterns, turned up in Dover in August 2007 just when the equinox and lunar cycle coincided to replicate the tidal conditions that Caesar reported, and figured that the problem could be sorted by assuming an easily-made clerical error by someone who copied the original manuscript. If so, time and tide would have been just right for a landing at Deal on August 22 or 23. Case closed - possibly.

This is arcane science applied to ancient history, and it makes both subjects lively. To get a more complete picture of the problem, Olson and his colleagues and students had to read Dio Cassius, and study Valerius Maximus, a chronicler from the first century AD. They had to consult classicists and archaeologists, match the Julian and Gregorian calendars, examine the verdicts of Victorian astronomers and naval hydrographers and use global positioning satellites to measure their own progress around the Channel coast."

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Roman Paris

A new internet friend just sent me this link to a marvelous site about ancient Roman Paris. It not only includes beautiful 3D graphics of reconstructions of some of the original Roman structures but an interesting virtual tour of places that can be visited today that have vestiges of Paris' Roman past. I found the description of the multi-use amphitheater particularly fascinating:

"What today is known as Les arènes de Lutèce [the Lutetian arena] is in fact a Gallo-Roman mixed-used amphitheatre, i.e. an amphitheatre with a stage. It consisted of an oval arena, two large lateral entryways and a cavea that did not completely encircle the arena. The missing section was taken up by a stage for mimes, pantomimes and singing performances. The arena was where gladiatorial combats (munera) took place and where wild beasts were hunted (venationes). The structure had an exterior gallery and a highly ornamented facade. Its impressive size-100 X 130.4 meters-make Lutetia's amphitheatre/stage one of the largest constructions of its kind in Gaul." If you enjoyed this post, never miss out on future posts by following me by email!

First Punic War Rostrum Found Off The Coast of Sicily

"Italian researchers say a rostrum, used by ancient Romans to ram enemy ships, was found off the coast of Sicily.

The rare bronze appendage may have been used in the final naval battle of the First Punic War, ANSA reported Tuesday. The rostrum was recovered about 230 feet below the surface by divers aided by remotely operated vehicles.

Sicily's maritime affairs department department head, Sebastiano Tusa, said the Egadi rostrum confirms his theory that a battle took place northeast of the island of Levanzo between fleets from Rome and Carthage during the Battle of the Egadi in 241 B.C., the Italian news agency said."

It was the ancient custom for Roman senators and victorious generals to give speeches from the captured prows, or bows of enemy ships. The ships would then be drawn up on the beach and destroyed except for the prow.

"When you won a naval victory, you cut off the enemy rostra, brought them home, and mounted them on new ships of your own. The bronze prow was the most costly part of the ship, so bringing home the other guy's rostra meant that you could expand your fleet. After really great victories, you could do some serious bragging by mounting some of the rostra for public display rather than reusing them -- "We beat them so bad we have rostra to spare!" So Duilius mounted six "spare" captured rostra on the face of the forum tribunal after his fleet demolished the Latin fleet at Antium in 338 BC. In 260 BC, C. Duilius Nepos added several more after beating the Carthaginians at Mylae. Julius Caesar's plan to expand what by then was called "the Rostrum" was carried out by Augustus, but Augustus's rostra were decorative fakes -- real bronze showing wealth, but not from enemy ships. (The brick Rostrum seen today is a modern restoration.)

Augustus mounted real rostra from the naval battle of Actium on the front platform of the temple that he built to honor his assassinated uncle, "The Divine Julius (Caesar)", and that was particularly significant for two reasons. First, the Actium rostra were Roman, not foreign: they came from Marc Anthony's fleet. Second, Augustus was proclaiming the dominance and divinity of what was to become the Julio-Claudian dynasty both by putting a temple to his uncle Julius in the forum and by placing trophies on its front. He thus established a new Julio-Claudian Rostrum, and during that dynasty you had to be brave or silly to use the old one. The Flavian Emperors took over after Nero ended the Julio-Claudian line in disgrace, and use of the original Rostrum at the other end of the forum resumed." - Tom Wukitsch, Arlington Learning in Retirement Institute

Our English word rostrum, for the wooden stand used by a public speaker, comes from the Latin word for ship's prow.

For coin collectors in the crowd, the presence of a ship's prow on a coin reverse was used to signify victory, the importance of the grain supply (which was carried from Egypt in ships) or an emperor's care in ensuring an adequate grain supply."

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Great history website for children!

I was researching the ongoing excavation of a Roman fortress at Caerleon and stumbled across a great website for children about the Romans and the Celts. It includes curriculum materials for the study of the Boudiccan revolt with suggested classroom activities. It includes information about the Wetwang chariot and how archaeological evidence, found at the Wetwang chariot burial, has been used to reconstruct a Celtic chariot. The interactive also includes a step by step demonstration of how the chariot would have been made.

It also includes a "web quest" about the Bath House at Caerleon Roman Fortress. There are 5 tasks to complete. It includes an interesting bank of resources from the collections of the Roman Legionary Museum. It even includes a web-based book for children about Roman gladiators.

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