Digitising Aegean Bronze Age Buildings: Building Typologies from Digital Plans

How and why did people living in the Aegean region over 3,000 years ago construct their buildings in the manner that they did? By having access to digital building plans our understanding of building techniques used in the region during this era can be improved. The application of digital spatial analyses to determine what could be possible reasons why certain materials and dimensions were used in building construction can be facilitated more readily by making digital plans available. A brief discussion of results from digitising the building plans at the site of Akrotiri on Thera will be presented. This paper then proposes a project to produce a Geographical Information System (GIS) database of architectural remains from the most significantly researched Bronze Age sites in the Aegean. This GIS can then be used to determine what influenced ancient construction techniques based on dimensional and material analyses of these digital architectural plans and records. Furthermore spatial analyses of this larger cohort of buildings can then lead to the formulation of more comprehensive building typologies that may have been used by builders during the Bronze Age era in the Aegean region.