ABSTRACT
There has been a rapid increase of interest recently in generating digital reconstructions of ancient cities and artefacts, both within the academic community and also the general public. Whilst there has always been a fascination with picturing ancient monuments and cities (Piggott, 1978), there seems to be an increased popular awareness. There may be many reasons for this high level of activity; it could be partly as a result of the movie and computer games industry, partly also perhaps because of the advent of computer networking and high-speed computer graphics on the desktop, and probably due also to the interest that many people have for things historic/exotic. The digital reconstructions (or ‘virtual heritage’, or visualizations, or even virtual reality) exist as CD ROM products, as museum or exhibition displays (for example, several of the Pavilions at Expo ’98 in Lisbon featured virtual reality historical experiences), as proprietary research documents or in a variety of formats on the Internet. The visualizations exist as serious research material and as sets for games and entertainment. A large selection of material available is also naturally on the Web, and searches with key words like ‘virtual heritage’ will bring up many sites presenting the results of reconstructions of cultural monuments and city scapes.
