Long before interactive archaeological maps became a normal museum feature, the Corinth Computer Project was trying to reconstruct an ancient city with survey instruments, AutoCAD, satellite imagery and a website that began serving research to the public in the 1990s.
Visit the original Corinth Computer Project page.
The project itself began in 1988 under David Gilman Romano at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Its original problem was wonderfully concrete: the Roman colony at Corinth was too large, complicated and chronologically layered to understand from excavated buildings alone. The team wanted a precise computer-generated map that could show how streets, structures and land divisions fit together across time.
That meant field work, not merely digitizing old books. Between 1988 and 1997 the project used electronic total stations to survey above-ground monuments, roads and structures. Back in the laboratory, those measurements were combined with topographical maps, architectural plans, aerial photography and eventually satellite imagery.
Archaeology met AutoCAD early
Romano had already been using AutoCAD in teaching during the 1980s. The obvious but then-unusual idea was to stop treating each building drawing as an isolated object and instead combine them into a larger digital representation of the city.
By the mid-1990s, the project had also become a web project. A 1997 version of the site described the work as a computerized architectural and topographical survey and made plans, methodology and research material available outside the laboratory. A conference paper later noted that the website had been maintained since roughly 1995-1996 and had become both a preliminary publication system and a teaching tool.
That distinction matters. This was not a glossy virtual tour built after the research was finished. The web was part of the research workflow while the project was still developing.
Why it still matters
The current Corinth Computer Project continues the work, but the old University of Pennsylvania address is a nice fossil from the point when academic researchers were discovering that the Web could be more than an electronic brochure. It could expose working maps, bibliographies, methods and preliminary results directly to students and other researchers.
The project eventually grew far beyond the original Roman street plan. It incorporated rural land division, multiple historical periods, aerial and satellite imagery, and regional landscape studies. More than 150 students have participated over the life of the project.
There is something particularly fitting about this old site surviving in the candidate list. Archaeologists study layers left behind by cities. Web archaeologists end up doing much the same thing with their research infrastructure.
Return to the original Corinth Computer Project page, or see the project’s newer site for where the work eventually went.