Giovanna Bagnasco Gianni

Designing virtual reality reconstructions of etruscan painted tombs

The application of Virtual Reality technologies is becoming largely widespread in the Cultural Heritage field. Digital restorations, virtual reconstructions, interactive navigations, are just some of the possible applications. In this paper, we present a preliminary Virtual Reality reconstruction of the Etruscan painted Tombs in Tarquinia. Only a part of these tombs are open to the public: using Virtual Reality it could be possible to visit all the Necropolis, with the possibility to interact with the environment, and to visualize additional information.

Comunicare per immagini: una questione di alfabeto

This contribution presents a new hypothetical interpretation of the use of alphabetical signs during the first phase of the spread of writing in Etruria . Several pieces of the first half of the seventh century B.C. seem to show evidence that the form of the letters might be considered as a system of remarkable and recognisable signs with a function other than writing texts. This same function seems to continue in a specific use of the alphabetical sequence up to the end of the seventh century B.C. In the case of the spread of writing to other regions of the Italian peninsula, the alphabetical sequence seems to function as dynamic architecture that makes it possible to create multifaceted sequences of letters and sounds. This contribution examines groups of inscribed objects such as the red dishes (with the inscription spanti ) and the kyathoi disseminated in Northern Etruria and present at Cerveteri, according to the same interpretation. These objects are considered as having a special relationship between sign and image in the framework of sacred ceremonies and as vehicles of long distance contacts.

The last ten years of research at Tarquinia

The Centro di Ricerca Coordinata ‘ProgettoTarquinia’ of the Universita degli Studi di Milano is a LERU (League of European Research Universities) exemplary interdisciplinary research project that involves groups from the Universita Statale di Milano (Archaeology, Information and Communication Technologies, Geoarchaeology, Palaeoanthropology), the Politecnico di Milano (Architecture and Topography) and bridges the gap between soft and hard sciences. This project stems from the ‘Progetto Tarquinia’ conceived by Maria Bonghi Jovino in 1982. During the last ten years, our integrated system of tools and services, supported by ICTs (ArchMatrix), through which multidisciplinary domain experts can examine all the typologies of data of a given culture, has made it possible to concentrate on the links between data-sources focusing on the recurrence of association rates within different aspects of material evidence and phenomena. The fields of application of our methodology in the domain of archaeology and epigraphy are multifaceted as regards the inside and outside connections of the Tarquinian heritage, whose necropolis with the famous painted tombs is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Research includes areas of the Civita plateau: the ‘monumental complex’, the Ara della Regina sanctuary, fortifications, and archaeological sites previously explored. In the past ten years, research in the necropolis (roughly 6,000 tombs, of which 400 are painted) and in the surrounding territory has also been implemented and has produced the complete corpus of the painted tombs of Tarquinia. Our holistic approach encompasses archaeological analysis of small (mobile finds), medium (archaeological contexts) and large scale (territory and landscape) architectural analysis and applications for integrated solutions for the cultural heritage, including the first bilingual Virtual Museum dedicated to an Etruscan city.

A Collaborative Knowledge Management System for Analyzing Non-verbal Markings in the Ancient Mediterranean World

This paper presents the results of an international archaeological project aiming to the study of non-verbal markings, named sigla, found on objects discovered in different excavation sites distributed in the Mediterranean area. The project is based on the involvement of an interdisciplinary team of experts from American and Italian universities and its aim is to develop a collaborative knowledge management system for formulating new hypotheses about the meanings, functions and roles of sigla stored in distributed archives. The paper analyzes knowledge integration problems and describes the design the environment supporting collaborative activities among archaeologists. For analysis purposes, the system integrates multimedia information retrieval strategies for recovering sigla according to certain conditions of similarity and taking into account other factors such as date, provenance and context. The conditions of similarity are based on possible recurrent patterns of sigla, connections and their layout merging from archaeologists’ descriptions or drawings of sigla.