The visual consumption of mural painting in late bronze age akrotiri (Thera, Greece) : A computational approach to visibility analysis in three-dimensional built environments

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The visual consumption of mural painting in Late Bronze Age Akrotiri (Thera, Greece) : a computational approach to visibility analysis on three-dimensional built environments

The devices used for the communication of meaning in mural painting often pervade pictorial space to reach out into actual space. This fact is often acknowledged in interpretations of Theran wall paintings that have been occasionally concerned with aspects of human experience and engagement with the decorated spaces. However, the reception of Theran murals within their original architectural context has been neither thoroughly nor systematically studied. This is mainly due to the lack of formal methodologies by which human engagement with ancient and partially preserved built environments could effectively be explored. This thesis investigates aspects of the visual experience of Theran wall-painting, and more particularly, the visibility of the murals and its relationship firstly to the iconographic meaning of the painted scenes, and secondly to the social function and significance of the paintings. It introduces a new method of visibility analysis that integrates 3D modelling and spatial technologies (GIS) to take account of the nature of human experience in the built environment which is essentially three-dimensional. The suggested approach also formally addresses the problems of uncertainty and incomplete data impact on archaeological interpretations. Finally, it discusses the issue of human movement which is strongly linked to the visual experience of built space and introduces an agent-based approach that aims to investigate aspects of mobility in populated spaces within the social context of movement in the past. the archaeological record along with their in The above methodology is employed to explore the reception of mural decoration in a visually complex ritual space (building Xeste 3), examining the relationship between visual emphasis in pictorial space and the visual exposure of individual elements of a composition in actual space. In this way, it highlights meaningful patterns in the archaeological record that would have otherwise remained unobserved. The results of the analysis are also suggestive of movement and circulation during ritual performances that could have taken place in the building. Furthermore, the same methodology is used to investigate whether pedestrians traversing the street network could have seen, through open windows, the wall paintings that embellished the interiors of elaborate private houses. The application of visibility analysis offers insights into the social significance and functions of Theran murals, illuminating their possible symbolic role in establishing power relations in the prehistoric society of Akrotiri.</p

Connecting landscapes with built environments: visibility analysis, scale and the senses

This paper reviews some of the main theoretical critiques of spatial technological approaches to the past, particularly of visibility analysis. It considers the extent to which methodologies for both the built environment and for wider landscapes might either reject or respond to these issues considering in particular (a) the claim that such work is based on a culturally-specific concept of space (the map) that is unlikely to have been shared by other cultures in the past and (b) the accusation that analysis of visual structure perpetuates a western bias towards vision over the other senses and "privileges" the visual over other aspects of perception and bodily engagement. The paper concludes that, although much of this critique can be contested or moderated in various ways, we should accept that vision is not easily separable from other senses. To respond to this challenge, it is suggested that we should seek a framework to understand the link between space and all the senses while at the same time seeking to bring together the traditions of spatial analysis for landscape archaeology and the built environment. One possible way forward maybe to combine the sensory/spatial framework used by proxemics for smaller scales with that defined by Higuchi for landscapes because they share some useful concepts. It is hoped that responding positively in this way to postprocessual critique may ultimately enrich formal methods of understanding ancient urban environments and landscapes

Three-dimensional visibility analysis of architectural spaces: iconography and visibility of the wall paintings of Xeste 3 (Late Bronze Age Akrotiri)

In recent years various methods of visibility analysis have been applied to investigate human engagement, experience and socialisation within historic and prehistoric ‘natural’ and built environments. On many occasions these approaches appear to be either extremely limited or wholly inadequate for the interpretation of complex built structures and building interiors because they do not fully model the three dimensional geometry of such spaces. This paper briefly reviews computational approaches to visual analysis that have been previously applied in archaeological research, and then goes on to introduce a new analytical technique that uses fully 3D reconstructions of past environments. This method integrates common functionalities of 3D modelling software and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), essentially permitting viewshed analysis to be performed upon objects of any form and shape modelled in 3D. We argue that the proposed methodology can generate new data and encourage fresh lines of enquiry in the study of extant and partially preserved historic and prehistoric built structures in a variety of contexts, ranging from building interiors and townscapes to landscapes. The potential of the method is illustrated by applying the suggested analysis to explore visual perception issues associated with the urban remains of Late Bronze Age Akrotiri

Call for Papers: Communicating the Past in the Digital Age

This two-day international symposium aims to bring together scholars that use and develop digital tools and methods for communicating archaeological information to students, peers and the public

Formal modelling approaches to complexity science in Roman studies: a manifesto

Complexity science refers to the theoretical research perspectives and the formal modelling tools designed to study complex systems. A complex system consists of separate entities interacting following a set of (often simple) rules that collectively give rise to unexpected patterns featuring vastly different properties than the entities that produced them. In recent years a number of case studies have shown that such approaches have great potential for furthering our understanding of the past phenomena explored in Roman Studies. We argue complexity science and formal modelling have great potential for Roman Studies by offering four key advantages: (1) the ability to deal with emergent properties in complex Roman systems; (2) the means to formally specify theories about past Roman phenomena; (3) the power to test aspects of these theories as hypotheses using formal modelling approaches; and (4) the capacity to do all of this in a transparent, reproducible, and cumulative scientific framework. We present a ten-point manifesto that articulates arguments for the more common use in Roman Studies of perspectives, concepts and tools from the broader field of complexity science, which are complementary to empirical inductive approaches. There will be a need for constant constructive collaboration between Romanists with diverse fields of expertise in order to usefully embed complexity science and formal modelling in Roman Studies