How does a virtual 3-D model help experts visualize how buildings like the Colosseum looked and worked?
I’ve been going to the Colosseum for years. And what I’m about to confess is true of a lot of my colleagues. You go to the Colosseum, you look at the remains of those underground chambers, which are what you mainly see today, and it just is a confusing mess. It’s a confusing mess for good reasons. It represents the random ruins of four different phases of construction, all jumbled together. Well, there’s a brilliant engineer and archaeologist at the German Archeological Institute in Rome named Heinz Beste. And Heinz took on the project of disentangling all these ruins and sorting them out. He identified the different phases and made drawings reconstructing how each phase worked. He kindly agreed to work with us and helped us to understand the fourth and final phase, which is consistent with the period we modeled. He was able to show us where were the walls, where were the corridors, where were the chambers for the animals, where were the chutes they forced the animals through and where
