Reconstructing Pozzuoli: textual and visual reconstructions of a Roman port town

With its long tradition of trade contacts with the eastern Mediterranean, coupled with the productivity of Campania, Pozzuoli rapidly became a centre for technical and commercial expertise. It soon became the principal port of the Capital in the late 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC and maintained its function as a port of Rome at least till the 3rd Century AD. Pozzuoli was also a ‘packet port’ for travellers to the east and the principal place of arrivals and departures for officials, embassies and ordinary travellers making the port very cosmopolitan in nature. Its richness in archaeological remains coupled with its unique geological setting has resulted in plenty of scholarly research, particularly on the individual public monuments of the port. There has however been little attempt to understand the urban development of the port and when compared to other Campanian towns such as Pompeii and Herculaneum, thematic research in the area is still in its infancy. The context within which the study will take place is the idea of knowledge representation and the use of visualisation as a tool for understanding complex datasets. Pozzuoli has been represented in many ways through various periods in time and a digital visualisation, together with the process with which the vast documentation is selected gathered, transformed and ultimately aims to provide a legitimate synthesis of all the complex information that has accumulated over time. The methodology adopted will be that which adheres to the principles of the London Charter with a particular a focus on the documentation of process known as ‘Paradata’ and attempts to provide a new critical example of its implementation.