move through ancient spaces...without leaving your desk

Some graduates of the same department from which I graduated at UBC (Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies), along with various faculty and professional support, have developed a fantastic and fun interactive website: Ancient Spaces. If digging in the dirt isn't your first choice for reconstructing the spaces of the past, but you're still interested in what the architecture and cultural setting would have looked like, this is the wesbite for you.

This group has put together 3-D, interactive virtual spaces that can be moved through by the viewer, by combining archaeological data with video game technology. So far, models have been made of Ancient Athens, the village of Deir el-Medina in Egypt, Machu Picchu in Peru (image, above), and a Nisqa'a village (all of these virtual sites are still works in progress).

Though I suspect it is still not as good as moving through the real sites themselves, these virtual models allow a 3-D appreciation that cannot always be garnered from the archaeological data in situ alone.