The Pollyanna* game: how to be happy that something went wrong

* For those who are not familiar with cheesy children literature, Pollyanna is an annoyingly optimistic little girl always looking at the bright side of things.

The famous "Cave Canem" mosaic at the entrance of
the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii

When I went to the House of Orpheus in Pompeii, I focused my attention on the place where, I assumed, the mosaic was found: the entrance.

It struck me that the entrance’s floor was sloping. So, I thought, not only the artefact is exhibited (in the Museum of Naples) on a wall when it was supposed to be on the floor, but it is also exhibited perfectly flat when it was meant to be inclined. It looked like a potentially straightforward and effective case for a 3D contextualisation.

I started investigating what you could see from the entrance, how the dog mosaic interacted visually with the other elements in the house: the impluvium, the water and its reflection, the opening on the garden at the back of the tablinum, the actual plants and the painted landscape, the columns, etc... Very exciting (to me, at least!). My attention was also drawn on the interaction between the mosaic and the entrance doors and on the possible shape and movement of doors working on a sloping floor. Even more exciting.

Then, The-Winged-Genius-of-Best-Practice seated on my shoulder and whispered in my ear: “did you check the original records? I mean, are you 100% sure that the mosaic was found at the entrance?” 
“Of course I’m sure!” I told the winged creature “where else would you put such a mosaic? Have you ever been in Pompeii?! They are ALL at the entrance!”

Mosaic of a Chained Dog, Entrance of the
House of Paquius Proculus, Pompeii

But once such a doubt has hit your mind you can’t get rid of it. So I checked the original records. And I discovered that all my research hypotheses were actually pretty meaningless if not completely wrong.

According to Matteo della Corte’s records, the mosaic wasn’t found at the entrance but in room 9, a little, beautiful, extremely decorated room just at the right of the entrance (the space that is often occupied by the porter guard).

The mosaic was actually flat, there was no relevant visual interaction with the garden, the impluvium or any other architectonical feature. Actually, the mosaic is not even visible from the street.

I was misled by my experience of the site and by own cultural background according to which such signals (proper or whimsical) are always put in a place where everybody can see them BEFORE entering or approaching a house. So much so that, according to what I have read, a house owner might have even found a “beware of the dog” mosaic more affordable (and almost equally effective) than an actual dog.

Being the function of such artefacts usually to warn and scare visitors (or potential offenders), it was quite sensible to assume that they were placed in the point of the house that is most visible from the street. Nonetheless, I shouldn’t have assumed it.

The fact that the other mosaics with dogs survived in Pompeii are at the entrance doesn’t mean that they ALL used to be placed at the entrance.

Mosaic of a Sleeping Dog, Entrance of the
House of Caecilius Iucundus, Pompeii

I was quite disappointed. My supervisor reminded me that things that do not follow the rules may lead to very interesting new discoveries. The dog mosaic from the House of Orpheus is certainly a curious exception and, if I was doing my research in a traditional academic environment, I would have been enthusiastic about this unexpected oddity. However, I was trying to build a tool for the general audience and I thought that, for that purpose, it would have been much better to show the rule and not the exception.

So, what was I supposed to do? It was too late to choose another case study. I had to sort out something with what I had got: a small mosaic of unknown function found in a room of unknown function. I know, it doesn’t sound great...

Actually, the more I tried to understand this artefact and its context, the more it won my interest and attention. In the end I was completely absorbed by this little pseudo-mystery. So I told myself: “it wouldn’t be perfect if I could make the audience as engaged as I am with the understanding of this artefact?”. 

And that became my new plan...

You need a circle to build a house

The plan of the House of Orpheus was the first one I drew directly in 3D studio max. 

Initially, I considered using Adobe Illustrator (a software I used quite often in my previous job) but then I realised that now I am more comfortable with Max than with any other graphic software. Furthermore, a plan drawn in Max will be entirely compatible with the 3D model (avoiding some of the problems that imported files may cause).

My plan of the House of Orpheus in 3D Studio Max

At the beginning, I was quite clueless about the methodology to use but Drew, my supervisor, thought me a very effective method based on an initial assumption and the use of circle shapes (or 25 sided n-gon which, in this context, is pretty much the same).

Our initial assumption (arbitrary as every assumption) was that the atrium of the HoO is a regular rectangle. Although I really doubt that there is any really straight wall in an ancient Roman house, the assumption is mandatory as a starting point. Moreover, the atrium is actually a fairly regular space.

Then, using the data we collected on site, I designed circles with the same ray as the dimension I wanted to represent. The very handy thing is that, being every point of the circle at the same distance form the centre, the circle is still a precise mark even when the adjacent element turns out to be not completely aligned.

Why did I need such a feature? They say numbers never lie, but in my experience they never completely match either :-)

Material errors during transcription, different layers of plaster, non regular shapes. I can think of a number of variables that may affect the measuring operations. Or it’s just a kind of useful curse to remind 3D modellers that they are not reproducing “the real thing” but only a representation of it. Actually, I encountered a similar issue when I was working on the Temple of Isis. Not only I have never seen two plans with identical measures but sometimes it was difficult even to find two sources that roughly agreed on something. Now I can easily imagine the headaches that Francesco Piranesi or John Soane suffered!

My plan of the House of Orpheus in 3D Studio Max
(all the working layers visualised)

Considering the basic level of fuzziness (usually between 2 and 7 cm) embedded in my data, using circle shapes was extremely useful and allowed me to deal with that fascinating jigsaw of walls, doors and columns.

Here are few things I should say about this digital plan, in order to make it more transparent.

* The thickness of the walls in the House of Orpheus if fairly regular. With the exception of the wall separating rooms 5 and 10, they all measure between 40 and 45 cm. Thus, I thought it was safe to assume that the walls I wasn’t able to measure because they are shared with other houses we were not allowed to enter (such as the south wall of the garden, or the west walls of rooms 14 and 15 ) follow the same rule. I also made the assumption that the walls overlooking the street are a bit thicker than the internal ones.

* The length of the viridarium (from south to north) has been calculated summing the diameters of the columns to the distance between them. Even though I have measured every single intercolumnation, I have measured only one column and I have assumed (for simplicity) that they have all the same diameter. I also assumed (again, for simplicity) that all the columns were perfectly aligned. My calculation was quite well backed up by the sum of the elements belonging to rooms 12, 4, 5, 10 and 11.

* All the traditional plans of Pompeii I have seen so far, tend to simplify the shape of the rooms and make them more regular than they actually are. I have chosen to preserve the irregularities and the oddities in the rooms dimensions because I thought they might be relevant in the visual analysis.

* The positioning of the impluvium in the present map is an approximation. It was the last element of the House we measured and we were running out of time (and light). I measured the dimensions of the impluvium itself and its marble elements but I didn’t measure their distance from the walls of the atrium.

My supervisor is quite confident that we could derive a more precise position through the photogrammetry of the atrium he ran.

* When I had little inconsistencies with my data I chose the option tending to the most regular shape.

A good recipe

Pompeii VI, 14, 20. House of Orpheus
Entrance, Photo by V. Vitale 2012

This was the first time I took hard measurements of an ancient building, so this experience was extremely useful (and exciting!) to me.

Here is a list of things that, according to what I have learnt, can give you a successful field experience: 

Permission: the House of Orpheus is actually closed to the public, so we asked for a permission to access and document the building. I am glad to say that, in spite of an easy prejudice, our permission was granted in a couple of weeks and we had no problems entering the site. I take this opportunity to thank Grete Stefani, Director of the Scavi, and all her staff for the kindness and efficiency.

A clever mate: I would also like to thank Dr. Faith Lawrence, from the King’s College Department of Digital Humanities, who kindly volunteered to assist me in the measuring operations. My final work owes a lot to her patience and precision in those days (not to mention the good company).

A sunny day (or, at least, a non rainy one): luckily, a part from some clouds in the afternoon, the light was not too bad for taking photographs.

A Code: as I discovered, transcribing measurements is not that easy. Not even if you want to annotate them on a pre-existing plan (method we used with the Temple of Isis but not with the House of Orpheus). Where would you put, for example, all the information connected to the hight of the elements? (doors, steps etc...)

You need to work out a code to register all the information. That’s why I am so happy Faith joined us. Not only she wrote the information quickly and correctly, but she also worked out on the spot a visual code simple enough to be still understandable weeks later when I actually started working on the model.

A hard covered black agenda: if you want to measure straight walls with an EDM (electronic distance measurer) you will soon find out that you have a problem! Obviously, the laser only works if it has a surface to fall on. So, my supervisor showed me that the best way to deal with this problem is to create a little extension of the wall that the laser can target. His black Moleskine perfectly served the purpose! 

House of Orpheus, Room 10
An example of the two layers of plaster
photo by V. Vitale 2012

Tolerance and flexibility: holding an EDM gives you the illusion of precision. Until you start using it. There is nothing wrong with the tool, of course. The problem is that you have to decide every 5 minutes WHAT are you actually measuring and if it is really relevant for your research. You simply cannot measure everything. The process is much more time consuming then I thought. For a big villa such as the House of Orpheus a whole day is not enough. So, you have to decide your priorities. For example, to my project, decorative elements were not so relevant because I was going to build a synthetic model.

The other major issue was dealing with the thickness of walls. Frescoes were painted on a quite thick layer of plaster of 4 or 5 cm. Furthermore, many rooms in the House of Orpheus have been re decorated. It means that a new layer had been applied on the previous one. Thus, we are talking of an extra thickness of 7-10 cm. (not to mention the plaster deformed by the exposure to the atmospherical elements). 

The point is that the plaster didn’t survive in all the rooms and, within the same room, it didn’t survive on all the walls. So, in more then few occasions, I had to decide if I wanted to measure the length of a wall with or without the remains of the plaster. Some other times I just couldn’t decide because the wall was entirely covered by or entirely devoid of the plaster layers.

I wanted to be as much consistent as possible and I decided, when I had the choice, to measure the dimensions WITH the plaster layers because I thought it was a better approximation of the dimensions of the spaces as they were perceived by people (which is my main interest in this case). However, it implies that a discrepancy of 7-10 cm is very likely to appear in many of my measurements. As I was not interested in such a level of precision for my present research, I believe my plan is still a very reliable starting point for the model. Moreover, I assume that the architects who drew the previous plans had to deal exactly with the same issue.

House of Orpheus, room 7
The Plaster Dilemma: where to target the EDM? To the surviving plaster bits or to the masonry?
Photo by V. Vitale 2012

A foresighted supervisor: taking hard measurements is something that you shouldn't do on your own. You need at least one more person to write things down (or hold your Moleskine when you use the laser measurer!). It is even better if a third person (let’s say your supervisor, for example) independently retake some of the measurements allowing you, days later, to double check your data. It is easy to get confused when you spend a whole day writing down numbers. A series of second measurements is a priceless back up.

A camera (possibly a good one): sometimes you have to model buildings that do not exist anymore. Sometimes you have to model buildings you’ve never seen with your eyes. Some other times you are lucky enough to be able to go on site and take loads of pictures. I took more than 300 and I thought they were enough. I was wrong: they are never enough! 

Pictures have been crucial for the drawing of the plan and the modelling. When I had a doubt, I went to check my pictures. I also took full advantage of both the contemporary and the historical pictures available on pompeiiinpictures and I definitely want to contribute to this very precious service myself. I will be more than happy to share my photographic documentation with all the archeologists and modellers who are interested in it.

Orpheus has a new plan

VanderPoel's plan of the House of Orpheus
Highlight in orange: the south wall of the garden

In order to model a visualisation of the House of Orpheus, I decided to make a new plan of the building, based on the hard measurements we took on site.

Why? What is the added value of such an effort? Wouldn’t have been more sensible to start from a good pre existing plan, such as Presuhn’s or Vander Poel’s ones?

I had basically two reasons for that.

First, maps and plans are simplified visualisations of places. Thus, they are «models», ie artificial objects created to represent and study reality. This implies that they cannot represent all the aspects of reality but have to choose what is relevant for a specific purpose. To make it simpler, I wanted a plan made ad hoc for my purpose, and the only way to have it was, basically, to make my own.

For example, if we compare Presuhn’s and Vander Poel’s plans we’ll notice that they are slightly different. In the latter, the south wall of the garden is slightly divergent from the north one, while in the former the south wall converges to the north one quite dramatically.

Who is right and how did it happen? In my opinion, the point is that all maps start from some artificial assumptions. The first assumptions affect the entire visualisation of the data. Presuhn and Vander Poel probably started from different assumptions, thus their plans (which are both not «the real place» but a representation of it) are not identical. However, if their purpose was (as I think) to visualise the relationships between buildings and their arrangement in the city plan, the maps are both useful and both «correct».

Presuhn's plan of the House of Orpheus
Highlight in orange: the south wall of the garden

However, my purpose wasn’t to examine the House of Orpheus in a relational perspective. Actually, it is very relevant to me if a wall like the viridarium's one is straight or not because it would definitely affect the information about visibility of spaces.

Eventually, I decided to build my own map relying on my hard measurements, photographic documentation, previous plans and satellite photographs as the ones offered by google maps and google earth.

Second, Johanson says that there is no better way to understand an ancient building than rebuild it, at least in a virtual space. I discovered it when I started modelling and this relationship still deeply fascinates me. In my previous experience, I always started from someone else’s plan. At the beginning, I saw the need to draw my own one “only” as a challenge and an opportunity to learn new skills. 

Then, when I started working on the plan I realised how much I was already learning about the building itself, the relationship between spaces, the orientation, the proportions, the position of doors, the balance (or lack of it). When I finished the plan, I already knew crucial information about the building even before starting the proper modelling.

"we were all the more vividly transported into the past"

Kitchen utensils found in Pompeii
From The Wonders of Pompeii available
on The Project Gutenberg

On site, buildings on their own look empty and it is difficult to imagine them as lived spaces. In museums, objects on their own are abstractions, not entirely comprehensible. But when they are connected (and connected with their context) they offer a much more valuable experience to the visitor. 

Unfortunately, putting them together (creating a link between the city and the artefacts) requires a big effort of visual imagination, especially considering how little information is available both on site and in museums to help the user.

When I went to the Museum of Naples for the first time, one of the museum staff members claimed that the ideal user experience should be: going to Pompeii, then visiting the museum of Naples and last going to Pompeii again. 

It is exactly what I did for my research: I went to Pompeii, to Naples and again to Pompeii in a few weeks time. Actually, the experience was so exciting I decided to spend my next 4 years studying it! However, how many tourists and visitors are likely to do something similar? Very few indeed. This is why I think digital unification and virtual museums are successful approaches to deal with a problem that can only be solved in the digital space.

As a support for my thesis, I’m borrowing the words of writers much better than me to describe on the one hand the frustration of the tourist in Pompeii and on the other hand how much the experience of the artefacts can enrich the perception of the buildings (and viceversa). 

Pompeii, the Small Theatre
From The Wonders of Pompeii available
on The Project Gutenberg

“I might tell you of a pretty picture on a rich mosaic in such-and-such room. You would go thither to look for it and not find it. The museum at Naples has it, and if it be not there it is nowhere. Time, the atmosphere, and the sunlight have destroyed it. Therefore those who make out an inventory of these houses for you are preparing your bitter disappointments. The only way to get an idea of Pompeian art is not to examine all these monuments separately, but to group them in one’s mind, and then to pay the museum an attentive visit.”

The Wonders of Pompeii, Monnier, 1867

“we were all the more vividly transported into the past, when all these objects were part and parcel of their owner’s life. They quite changed my picture of Pompeii. In my mind’s eye its homes now looked both more cramped and more spatious - more cramped because I now saw them crowded with objects, and more spacious because these objects were not made merely for use but were decorated with such art and grace that they enlarged and refreshed the mind in a way that the physical space of even the largest room cannot do.”

Italian Journey, Goethe, 1816 

"To say" and "to do": why objects in museums are not self explanatory

If we focus on everyday-life items, archaeological museums have many issues in common with ethnographic museums. This is why I am reading a book written by a great Italian anthropologist, Alberto Mario Cirese, who I was lucky enough to have as a teacher some years ago.

The classification, interpretation and display of objects in ethnographic museums was one of its main research interests and I found papers and books such as Oggetti Segni Musei (Objects Signs Museums) still incredibly relevant to the present scholarly debate.

Cirese complains about the practice of exhibiting everyday-life items on walls or in glass cabinets with little or no information about their use. Curators are biased because they already know how the objects were employed, so they assume this information is easily accessible to the audience and it is somehow embedded in the objects themselves. 

Not only experience tells us that this is not true, but, according to Cirese, logic suggests it as well.

Aesthetic objects, as statues or paintings, have a strong communicative value. They are objects meant “to say”, to make themselves comprehensible (through logic or emotion) to the viewers. This is why they tend to work quite well in museums or even in churches or streets.

But everyday-life objects such as looms, pots, tools, machinery they are not meant “to say” something but “to do” something, to work instead of communicate. Thus they lack the visual information necessary to be understood at first glance. Nonetheless, when they are exhibited in ethnographic (or archaeological) museums they are supposed “to say about how they work” as they have suddenly became self explanatory only because they have been moved to a museum context.

Obviously, there are many intermediate positions between this opposition (my language skills make it very difficult to render in English such an effective terminology as the one used by Cirese who opposed «segnico» to «fabrile»). For example, as Cirese reminds, there are objects that have both a practical and a communicative function such as ex voto. 

Ethnographic Museum in Formentera
from formenteraweb

However, in an archeological context where so many information about use are lost, even these kind of objects need to be contextualised to be understood (figurative votive offers to ancient divinities might be not as understandable as the ones closer to the scholar’s own cultural background). It also worths to mention what Leroy Gourhan called «aesthetic functionality*»: the attempt of good craftsmen to achieve best practice combining pleasantness and functionality, use and decoration.

Cirese claims that the only way to make objects understandable to an a non expert audience (ie an audience that has no idea about the original use of the objects themselves) is to recreate, as much as possible, their context of use. In case of tools, he believes it would be mandatory to show the object IN USE, to communicate its very relevance. 

The task is not easy, especially with those objects whose context is not fixed (a house, a shop) but intangible (or «volatile» as Cirese would have preferred to say) such as rites, games, celebrations.

According to Cirese, a realistic reconstruction (with mannequins, for example) wouldn’t have been effective because the attempt to reproduce reality is doom to fail and it is bound to be disappointing if not ridiculous. On the contrary, a synthetic representation that is explicitly not realistic but identifies and isolates only those characteristics of reality that are relevant to the exhibition purposes, could successfully deliver contextual information.

It really saddens me that Professor Cirese is no longer with us and I would be really happy to ask him if, in his opinion, non-realistic 3D digital visualisation could serve this purpose and even suggest new opportunities. 

I genuinely think so.

 (*my translation from Italian)

First impressions: ROOM 13

House of Orpheus, room13's roof
Photo by V. Vitale, 2012

This little room has an access on space 16 and a large window on the garden. The room is very well preserved. The delicate decoration on the yellow and black background are still visible and the colours very bright. It is a shame that the room is now used as storage area. The plastic boxes where some finds are kept lean a bit carelessly against the frescoed wall. Moreover, these boxes are likely to become (if not already) the refuge of little animals (with all the unpleasant consequences).

This room was probably a bedroom, with a nice view on the garden (but not on the fresco, obviously).

The remains of a little roof above the window seems to be original. On the windowsill is displayed a stone ball. I do not know if it is ancient (maybe a relic of the Sulla’s civil war?) and if it has been actually found in the house.

The room is covered by a wooden roof reconstructed for display purposes. This  choice might have positively contributed to the good status of the frescoes.  I assume that the modern roof has been built according to the evidence of the ancient one. Even though the restoration can be considered a bit too invasive, I think it can prove its usefulness. According to the tourist I have interviewed and the literature about Pompeii, the absence of the roofs is one of the elements that make difficult (especially for a tourist) to see the Pompeian ruins as actual houses. 

House of Orpheus, threshold and floor
Photo by V. Vitale, 2012

Under this respect the site of Pompeii is quite different from the one in Herculaneum where roofs, doors and windows (often heavily restored) communicate the sense of domestic spaces that used to be lived by people.

The floor of this room shows a nice and well preserved mosaic in opus signinum and white tesserae. The geometric pattern can still be admired, but it has also been documented by Presuhn (who also published a copy of the room wall decorations).

The room has both a marble threshold that suggest the presence of a wooden door and a quite large window (for such a small room) with a pleasant view on the garden.

It is curious that the restored roof covers not only this room in the house of Orpheus but also the contiguous room that belongs to the House of the Scientists. Actually, this external room also shares an other wall with the House of Orpheus, exactly half of the renowned frescoed one. Does it mean that the two Houses used to be arranged differently? May have they been rearranged after the earthquake?

Presuhn's plan. The area in yellow highlights the
relationship between the House of Orpheus and
the House of the Scientists

First impressions: ROOM 18 (viridarium)

House of Orpheus, Pompeii
Looking north from the viridarium
Photo by V. Vitale 2012

Unlike other houses in Pompeii, the House of Orpheus has an almost proper perystilium. It was quite common (at least in Pompeii) pretending to have a big and expensive house arranging carefully the elements that people were able to see from the street or from the tablinum. It is not rare in Pompeii to see houses with just two or three columns, but placed in a way to trick the passers by and let them believe that they were looking at an entire colonnade.

It is not the case of the Houseof Orpheus. The owner was rich enough to afford two whole sides of a perystilium. The half colonnade is large enough (7 columns on two sides) to allow visual access to the garden from both the tablinum and the triclinium (that are on the same vertical line). Both the two spaces offer a view on the house’s most precious decoration (straight view from the tablinum, diagonal view from the triclinium).

House of Orpheus
Old undated photograph. Courtesy of Society
 of Antiquaries. Fox Collection
From pompeiiinpictures

The slightly diagonal arrangement of the entrance corridor may seem an oddity until it is not considered as an element of the visual line that passes through the atrium (with the fountain), through the tablinum, the viridarium and ends on the big frescoed wall. The fresco’s decoration with plant, birds and animals was very likely to interact graciously with the real plants (and probably real animals like little birds or butterflies) of the garden. Moreover, the painted water in the landscape was probably interacting, on a echoing game of real and fictional, with the water sprouting from the fountain. 

Today, the trees and the plants (mostly myrtle) grown in the garden make quite difficult to see clearly the architectonical elements in the garden. It seems to be a water feature in opus signinum running around the edge of the viridarium. 

Tools

I have taken a first photographic documentation of the site with a small compact camera (Casio 10 Mpx). The quality of the outcome is not refined enough to be used as a source for the model’s texturing. Moreover, the camera only produces valuable pictures when the light conditions are very good. 

However, I am not interested in modelling and texturising the House of Orpheus how it is now (it could be relevant, for example, for conservation purposes). I am more interested in observing the architectonic features and try to understand why the different spaces of the house were organised in a certain way and what possible uses they might have allowed. Thus, my photographs have more a documenting purpose, to help me remember and visualise the characteristics of the different spaces of the house.

If I will need more detailed pictures in a future development of my project I will use a more suitable equipment.

Plan of the House of Orpheus
Courtesy of Pompeiiinpictures

Plan of the House of Orpheus
Emil Preshun

To organise and catalogue my pictures I have used, as a starting point, the numerical naming convention I have found in the map of the house available on the website pompeiinpictures.

As the website states, the map is only a reference to browse the pictures of the online collection. For this reason the map shows few inaccuracies (many rooms have “regularised” shapes, some features are omitted etc...). 

After I had already started my cataloguing, I have found a more detailed plan, published by Emil Preshun in Pompeji. Die Neuesten Ausgrabungen (available on openlibrary.org).

However, having measured the house on site with an electronic distance measurer (Bosh DLR130) I am thinking of designing a new plan with Adobe Illustrator or, as my supervisor suggested, directly with 3D Studio Max.

Orpheus and the Dog

Mosaic of the Guard Dog.
Pompeii, House of Orpheus VI, 14, 20
From British Museum website

My first idea was to choose the object and the related building to model and unify according to the results of my preliminary interviews. However, being the BM exhibition forthcoming, I could not ask the visitors (or potential visitors) which ones were the most relevant artefacts on display.

I have decided to start from the items highlight on the museum website and, among them, I have focused on the “Mosaic of a Guard Dog” from the House of Vesonius Primus (also known as The House of Orpheus).

My choice was based on the following criteria:

- I have a better knowledge of the Pompeian cityscape than the Herculaneum one. Having a limited time to complete my project, I thought it was more sensible and effective to maximise my previous experiences,

- I wanted to take hard measurements of the chosen building and it was easier for me to receive a permission for Pompeii,

- The artefacts that will be displayed are not yet in the British Museum. It was unlikely to receive special permission from the other Museums to acquire data about the items exhibited in glass cabinets, so I decided to focus on the flat ones that are easy to photograph and document even without special permissions.

- The image of the black dog is one of the most famous and it has been reproduced in  many books, guides and memorabilia.

The characteristics of the Mosaic of the Dog and the House of Orpheus made them the most sensible choice. Furthermore, an other very iconic Pompeian object that will be part of the BM exhibition such as the plaster cast of the agonising dog comes from the same House. Even though it wasn’t possible for me to acquire data about the cast of the unlucky animal, its story can be easily connected to the virtual model.

However, I am not forgetting user’s needs and expectations. I have started conducting unstructured interviews with visitors:

of the sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum

of the National Museum of Naples

of the Virtual Museum of Herculaneum (MAV)

in order to gather the first information about what different audiences think of the ancient remains and what kind of experience, real and virtual, they expect during the visit.

Old Summer Palace in Beijin

Fascinating Chinese virtual restoration project!
But there is any documentation available?

From Pompeii to the Trobriands

The baker Terentius Neo and his Wife
From wikipedia commons

As soon as it was available on the British Museums website, I have downloaded and read the press release about the exhibition to find out something more about the concepts underlying it.

According to what I have read, key features appear to be domestic spaces and ordinary lives of the people in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Apparently, this exhibition is going exactly in the direction I hoped for my project: material culture or, in other words, that fascinating intersection between archaeology and anthropology.

What is material culture about?

It is a bit like Digital Humanities, nobody exactly knows. I like to think that material culture is the study of what we leave behind us when we (as single persons or societies) pass away. I am aware that cultures are not only material and a lot of our heritage is not-physical or, better, non tangible. I am also aware that, as Malinowski remarks, a material object is meaningless without its immaterial context. But this is exactly the point. 
In his famous Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922:105), Malinowski says:

"A canoe is an item of material culture, and as such it can be described, photographed and even bodily transported into a museum. But [...] the ethnographic reality of the canoe would not be brought much nearer to a student at home, even by placing a perfect specimen right before him.

The canoe is made for a certain use, and with a definite purpose; it is a means to an end [...]. In the study of the economic purposes for which a canoe is made, of the various uses to which it is submitted, we find the first approach to a deeper ethnographic treatment. Further sociological data, referring to its ownership, accounts of who sails in it, and how it is done; information regarding the ceremonies and customs of its construction, a sort of typical life history of a native craft all that brings us nearer still to the understanding of what his canoe truly means to the native. 

Even this, however, does not touch the most vital reality of a native canoe. For a craft, whether of bark or wood, iron or steel, lives in the life of its sailors, and it is more to a sailor than a mere bit of shaped matter. To the native, not less than to the white seaman, a craft is surrounded by an atmosphere of romance, built up of tradition and of personal experience. It is an object of cult and admiration, a living thing, possessing its own individuality."

Trobriand Islands. A traditional canoe.
From Art Pacific

How many things of a dead person or culture can we understand looking at its objects?

I have worked once on the book collection of a famous Italian director. After that experience, I felt, irrationally, that I knew him deeply. It was one of the most vivid experience about how powerful objects can be.

In an archaeological context, how many things can we understand looking at an ancient artefact? Why the maker chose a specific material or a particular shape, why one section looks more consumed than the others, why it was stored in a certain place and where was it found?

What I have learnt is that we often don’t have univocal answers to all these questions. Nevertheless, artefacts (big or small, monumental or ordinary, precious or cheap) are kind of “instruction books” (to quote Rapoport not literally) to understand past cultures. Or at least try to.

The British Museum seems to explore this kind of approach quite successfully. I was reading today, on their blog, the “life-story” of the Amara pot.

Going back to Malinowski, how much do we lose when we look at the object separated from its context? I think this is one of the better potential applications of 3D visualisation, digital and virtual technologies. I believe that all the audiences would understand a lot more about, for example, the portrait of Terentius Neo and his wife (or the Amara Pot) if they could not only see the object exhibited in the museum but also, somehow, access a visualisation of it put in its context: that “domestic space” lived by “ordinary people” that is supposed to be one of the strongest concept of the whole exhibition. 

Nice to meet you

My name is Valeria Vitale, I have just finished an MA in Digital Humanities at King’s College London. My background is in multimedia and public engagement and I used to work in Italy for major theatres and museums.  During my MA I started working with 3D visualisation and I became convinced that it can be an extraordinary means to communicate and promote cultural heritage.

I am particularly interested in the use of 3D technologies to build a visual and  cognitive bridge between the archeological site and the related artefacts displayed in museums that are often located in different cities (or even nations). I also think that digital learning environments can be very effective in reinforcing the emotional connection between visitors and ancient objects.

Thanks to the V-Must program, I am back to King’s College for a 3 months internship with King’s Visualisation Lab, under the supervision of Drew Baker and Martin Blazeby. My case study is the British Museum’s forthcoming exhibition “Life and Death. Pompeii and Herculaneum”. Have you heard about it? If you didn’t, have a look at the website.

I am writing this blog to keep records of all the steps of my work, from the readings to the documentation of the 3D model according to the London Charter guidelines.

If you have questions, suggestions or comments feel free to post a comment.