3D-GIS as a Platform for Visual Analysis: Investigating a Pompeian House

Title

3D-GIS as a Platform for Visual Analysis: Investigating a Pompeian House

Creator(s)

Landeschi, Giacomo

Dell'Unto, Nicolo

Lundqvist, Karin

Ferdani, Daniele

Campanaro, Danilo Marco

Leander Touati, Anne-Marie

Date

2016

Is Part Of

Journal of Archaeological Science

Volume

65

Pages

103-113

Language

eng

ISSN

1095-9238

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2015.11.002

Zotero BiDiAr

https://www.zotero.org/groups/5293298/bidiar/items/9ICND9P2/item-list

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to introduce an innovative framework for employing 3D-GIS as an exploratory platform to perform visual analysis. Such a methodology is aimed at detecting patterns of visibility to simulate the past human perception of specific categories of artifacts placed inside a virtually reconstructed three-dimensional space. As a case study, the house of Caecilius Iucundus in Pompeii (regio V, insula 1, entrances 23 and 26) was chosen and two media of visual communication, a painting and a graffito were tested to make an assessment of their visual impact on hypothetical observers. The approach consists of a vector-based line-of-sight (LOS) analysis, now available as an integral component of the 3D-analyst toolkit of the ESRI ArcGIS 10.x software package. This toolkit allowed us to perform the entire process inside a GIS environment, without splitting the tasks among different software platforms. It was thus possible to detect a significant difference in terms of visibility among the observed objects.