The Acquarossa Memory Project: reconstructing an Etruscan town

Abstract

Digital techniques and cultural heritage connect, in an innovative way, new and old within the Humanities. In this new project, an Etruscan townscape will be recreated; modelled results created by the 4D Research Lab will be integrated in an Archaeological Park and Museum in such a way that international scholars and visitors can acknowledge and study 3D reconstructions of a series of Etruscan houses within their successive phases of creation, function, reception, destruction, and reconstruction. Acquarossa is an Etruscan town near Viterbo, Italy. Excavations carried out by the Swedish Institute in Rome revealed a series of Etruscan houses, inhabited from the 8th century BC until the middle of the 6th century BC, when the town was suddenly and inexplicably abandoned. The houses were left to crumble and the remains of the foundations, the walls and the decorated roofs, as well as the thousands of household utensils, were all found in situ. It is one of the very few examples of an intact Etruscan townscape, with a unique set of family dwellings from the past. The remnants of the houses were partially reconstructed in the 1980s and covered with soil, but others were left to be destroyed by weather conditions. The site was left to vanish completely. Since 2014, the 4D Research Lab of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam has been involved in an interdisciplinary research project, in collaboration with the private partner Azienda Agrituristica Raffaele Rocchi, the proprietor of the site, which focuses on the reconstruction of a set of houses in annotated 3D models. The 3D models will be used to build ‘actual’ guesthouses at the site itself, for which permission from the Soprintendenza per i Beni archeologici del Lazio e dell’Etruria Meridionale has been granted. The project aims to analyse the house architecture, roof decoration and building processes through 3D modelling and scanning.