Sunday, December 18, 2022

Digitally reconstructing Dura-Europos

VIRTUAL DATA CLOUD AND 3-D MODELING: Digitally rebuilding a lost city. Yale computer scientists, archaeologists, and historians are teaming up to uncover long-lost clues from the ancient city of Dura-Europos (William Weir, Yale News).
... The city, founded in 300 BC and abandoned in the third century AD, wasn’t considered a major metropolis, but historians say its artifacts could tell volumes about the everyday lives of people from that time and region. But because these artifacts are located in numerous locations and are often unmarked or have multiple labels, it is extremely difficult for researchers to study them.

Holly Rushmeier, the John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science, and Anne Chen, a postdoctoral associate at ARCHAIA, an interdisciplinary program at Yale for the study of ancient and premodern cultures, are working to change that. They recently received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a digital archive of materials related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos. They will create a virtual data cloud known as “linked open data” to bring together the disparate materials from this region. This will create a user-friendly interface that allows researchers to access the data, as well as add their own contributions.

I noted this project and its NEH funding here. This Yale press release has more information. Follow the links from there for a great many posts on Dura-Europos and its connection with ancient Judaism.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.