Hello all you wonderful historians, and thank you for the Trojan work you do in enhancing our understanding of the past. I asked this question in r/askarchaeology but it is a very small community (124 members) and I have not got a response thus far so thought to shoot my shot here also.
I am just starting out my training as a secondary school history teacher and have to teach about the methods of historians and Ancient Rome to my students. In the chapter in the textbook on Rome (To be clear, I don't like to rely on it too much, and always offer more information to students than what is in the textbook, as reading from a book is not really teaching), the author mentions the use of 3D modelling and photography in excavations of Pompeii and in archaeology more generally.
However, no further information is given on how these methods work, and I haven't been able to find much online either - I have read articles on the Lund University website talking about what they have discovered using 3D modelling and photography, mentioning a drone flying over Pompeii to scan the ruins, but nothing about how these methods actually work. How do these methods of technology work? Is it like projecting from a stump of concrete in the ground how the building above it may have looked based on projections? Scanning for concrete in the ground for where a house might have stood? The Lund website article mentioned being able to 'reconstruct an entire block of houses' using 3D modelling, but how could this have worked? I welcome any and all insight you can offer me. You're such troopers finding out about the past for all of us!
From an enthusiastic history teacher
There are lots of ways we can use 3D modeling in archaeology. I should state I’m by no means an expert, but as an archaeology PhD student nowadays, we sort of have to engage with this all the time.
The first and most obvious way is the fact that 3D modeling is huge for cultural heritage. Accurate 3D models can be used in game engines, in museums, in classrooms, even in some publications to show an aspect of the archaeological record which a photo or description wouldn’t. I for one love showing my students how cuneiform tablets react to light; reading these things was a much more tactile experience than the publications of them let on; you have to get the light in just the right places to be able to tell exactly what sign you’re looking at sometimes. 3D models let me introduce light onto them from a specific angle and manipulate them; it’s not exact, because the way you interact with a 3D model is not the same way you interact with a clay tablet, but it’s similar. There’s something about 3D models that feel “more real” to a lot of students, particularly if the UI to interact with them is well made. There’s pretty much an endless amount of things you can do as far as using 3D models as presentation tools.
Further interesting is how 3D models can be used for research. I don’t do this personally, but a professor of mine, Sebastian Heath, has studied, using 3D models, multiple aspects of the experience of being inside a Roman amphitheater. By using game engines to introduce sound to the space, doing line of sight analysis, and a few other things (I’m blanking on details), he was able to say something about the experience of a viewer in a Roman amphitheater when it was a complete building, with crowds and performance and life in it, which in the real world he could only do by building one and stuffing it with people.
Personally, I’ve used 3D modeling to create “ideal” Iron Age Anatolian pottery forms based off of section drawings, and then in Blender (a 3D modeling software; open source and free to access) messed around with putting different substances in them and seeing how they react to pouring, how easy they are to reach into with a utensil, etc. to discuss more about how form impacts function. I never published this though.
There’s also the very real and useful point that, using photogrammetry, you can make 3D models of your site, of objects in museums, etc. You can do this at multiple scales, so making a model of the entire site, or even a trench on the site at different stages of excavation. I love getting my hands on these because it lets you access the site and the team’s excavations in a way photos don’t.
I have definitely missed many, many things you can do, but I hope this helps! There have been a few publications on the theory of 3D modeling as applied to archaeology; I am unfortunately on mobile and don’t have exact references at hand for you, but can update when I do.
Unfortunately not a great expert, but I can highly suggest Prof Dr. Hubert Mara from Halle University. As far as I know he was one of the first to use 3d scanning in Archeology