Communicating in Three Dimensions: Questions of Audience and Reuse in 3D Excavation Documentation Practice

After excavating the Praedia of Iulia Felix at Pompeii in 1755, architect Karl Weber published the building with an axionometric illustration that showed the remains in three-dimensional perspective. In doing so, Weber communicated additional information about the form of the building in a manner that was both visually accessible to a lay audience and sufficiently “scientific” for a scholarly one. By contrast, digital 3D documentation methods in current archaeological practice can reinforce a division between “scientific” models intended for internal consumption by the project that produces them, and external communication in the form of lower-quality online digital displays. Using recent fieldwork at the Greek colonial site of Histria in Romania as a case-study, this paper explores the space between high-resolution contextualized 3D documentation used only by an internal audience and down-scaled, decontextualized 3D content designed for public consumption. In particular, it explores whether measurable 3D models derived from photogrammetric capture are useful in communicating excavation results to non-specialists – and if so, in what ways. It presents several scenarios for the role of high-quality 3D documentation in both formal and informal scholarly communication and discusses the potential for the reuse of such documentation to answer new research questions.