Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: How to measure and present ancient monumentality? By creating virtual reconstructions of ancient architecture (in contrast to physical reconstructions like a model or even life-sized rebuilding projects) we quickly loose the sense of bigness, richness and complexity. Creating virtual mud-bricks, walls, roofs or complete houses is often nothing more than a simple copy & paste function. Printed-out or even seen projected onto a wall, a reconstruction will not represent monumentality as it might have been perceived in antiquity. So how can we reconstruct monumentality and present it? As the research group defines, monumentality (or the XXL phenomena) is not confined to physical scale: the creation of monumental architecture involves a combination of great technical ingenuity, extraordinarily high levels of skill, the devotion of vast amounts of time to build them, the type and range of the resources invested and the sheer size of the task. A simple reconstruction shown in a museum or elsewhere doesn’t convey that complexity. Virtual models are perfect for measurement and theoretical experimentation. Based on reconstructions done for monumental architecture of ancient Uruk/Warka we were able to quantify the building materials used for very early monumental structures. In an experimental quantification of effort for each building category, we can even propose a scale of labour and value for each building. As mentioned before, size may not be the forming factor of monumentality, but rather out-of-norm effort, which can easily be visualised by linear regression modelling. The paper has now been published in: Federico Buccellati / Sebastian Hageneuer / Sylva van der Heyden / Felix Levenson (eds.), Size Matters – Understanding Monumentality Across Ancient Civilizations, transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2019, pp. 291-308: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4538-5/size-matters-understanding-monumentality-across-ancient-civilizations/