Ancient Hermione revealed: the contribution of high-performance computing and digital methods to the analysis of a hidden cityscape

Abstract

This article explores the potential of combining high-performance computing techniques and a set of integrated digital methods to investigate the cityscape of ancient Hermione, Greece. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), terrestrial laser scanning, image-based modelling techniques and high-performance computing have been combined to provide a fully-three-dimensional (3D) representation of the city landscape, which encompasses both the topography and those still visible archaeological features, which are nowadays annexed into the modern buildings. As a consequence, the resulting geo-located digital platform is now opening up interesting opportunities for research, such as the possibility to analyse spatial interconnections between sacred buildings, to formulate hypotheses about their location and to put them in comparison with the accounts made by historical sources. By taking advantage both of an entirely-3D reconstruction and the analytic tools provided by geographical information systems (GISs), more sophisticated analyses can now be performed and specific issues such as visual perception and movement to and from prominent buildings/spaces can now be investigated.