Corinna Rossi

Archaeological sites and artifacts are critical for understanding historical contexts, and maintaining their integrity is a vital undertaking. At the same time, ensuring their accessibility to enable direct study and exploration is essential for both researchers and the general public. To this aim, various works have explored the use of Digital Twins (DTs) for Cultural Heritage (CH) preservation and dissemination. However, the current state of the art remains fragmented and heterogeneous, with most approaches relying on ad hoc, case-specific solutions that are rarely reusable. In particular, existing research is often centered on individual digitization projects rather than on scalable frameworks that support the systematic creation and reuse of multiple DTs. Building on these considerations, this paper presents a scalable platform designed to streamline the construction and exploitation of archaeological DTs, enabling the rapid creation of case studies for both research and dissemination purposes. Specifically, we propose a no-code authoring environment that integrates 3D reconstructions of sites and artifacts with associated semantic information (e.g., annotations and points of interest), allowing users with limited technical expertise to create and manage DT-based experiences. The resulting case studies can be edited, organized, shared, and explored through both desktop and Virtual Reality interfaces. The platform positioning with respect to existing solutions has been explicitly investigated through a comparative analysis against representative state-of-the-art systems. In addition, the proposed approach has been evaluated through quantitative performance measurements, a comparative study, and two user studies targeting the Research and Dissemination modes, respectively. The platform was co-designed with curators from the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, and validated through case studies based on two archaeological sites from Deir el-Medina, Egypt.

The cluster of New Kingdom tombs at Saqqara and associated earlier and later burials excavated by the EES–Leiden–Turin mission, located in the southern portion of the Unas South Cemetery, was used to test a method to construct a comprehensive three-dimensional model of all the known visible and invisible spaces. All the structures above ground and the few spaces below ground that are currently accessible have recently been surveyed by photogrammetry and joined together into a single model. All the other parts, including a few structures above ground that were reburied after excavation and most of the currently inaccessible underground spaces, were geometrically modelled in 3D and attached to the photogrammetric data. The aim was to create a large-scale, composite, digital model of all the visible and invisible spaces recorded in the area, to be used as a research and dissemination tool.

The North Kharga Oasis Survey The North Kharga Oasis Survey (NKOS), co-directed by Salima Ikram and Corinna Rossi, was initiated in 2001 in order to locate, document, and map archaeological sites in the Kharga Oasis from the northern escarpment to the area just north of Kharga town. Although the oasis contains evidence dating to prehistoric times, the majority of standing remains are from the Late Period onward, with those in north Kharga primarily dating to the Roman era (1st–5th c. AD). Alt...

This article presents a comparative analysis of three Late Roman sites located at the northern outskirts of the Kharga Oasis in Egypt's Western Desert: Umm al-Dabadib, Ayn al-Labakha, and the Gib/Sumayra Complex. These were part of the district of the Oasis Magna, which included the oases of Dakhla and Kharga. An analysis of their layout, including both shape and extent, is followed by an evaluation of their absolute and relative positions. These data are then compared to the administrative and historical contexts within which the three sites flourished. Both administrative and economic aspects are considered, as well as the presence of the army. The complex picture that emerges suggests that these three sites played several roles at the same time and were part of a large-scale strategic design that encompassed not only the Kharga Oasis but the entire Western Desert.

This article focuses on the shape of the vaults that cover the rooms of the Fort of Umm al-Dabadib (Kharga Oasis, Egypt’s Western Desert), dating to the Late Roman Period. This building is the central element of the contemporary Fortified Settlement, consisting of a dense, three-dimensional mosaic of domestic units, all covered by similar vaults, and belonging to a chain of similar installations. Two elements make Umm al-Dabadib an interesting case-study: the excellent preservation of its architectural remains, and the possibility to rely on an accurate photogrammetric survey of the entire built-up area. Thanks to this combination, it was possible to analyse the geometric shape of the vaults in connection to the ancient building techniques. The study determined that the vaults of the Fort are elliptical; this conclusion will impact on the study of all the similar settlements built in the Kharga Oasis, and possibly to other contemporary buildings elsewhere in Egypt.

This article discusses the meaning and function of the act of measuring ancient Egyptian architecture in the present-day context, in which the advent of digital culture has allowed the accumulation of extremely precise and accurate data. Our expectations on our modern measurements may lead us to select the ancient data through a filter that does not correspond to the ancient perspective, thus affecting the validity of the results. In order to disentangle past and current perspectives, it may be useful to discuss two aspects: the difference between ancient measures obtained from calculations and observations, and the meaning of precision and accuracy in modern and ancient times. A reconstruction of the planning and building process of ancient monuments is likely to take a successful path only if we are willing to look at the evidence from a slightly different perspective, in which numbers become part of a larger and more complex operation.