Merging Archaeological Site Recreation and Museum Exhibition

Archaeological projects require a great amount of work in the representation and storage of digital data about the excavation of the archaeological site, the information about the encountered findings, and the analyses carried out by the laboratories and the consequent interpretations of the facts. However, though archaeological databases are of primary importance for retracing the interpretation processes and identifying the supporting elements, they often remain a pure archive, with no more accesses after the excavation activities; often, disciplinary experts work in isolation, and usually relying on scientific literature that rarely includes a friendly access to the datasets. A well-known presentation setting in archaeology is to exhibit results through virtual reality. Virtual reality yields the recreation of the remote site in a geospatial layout as well as the reproduction the diachronic phases of the excavation and the encounter of findings. This paper presents BeA-ViR, an application for virtual archaeology that is devoted to traversing boundaries and borders on multi-cultural dimensions (Japan-Europe), multi-targeted audiences (general audiences and multi-disciplinary scholars), and multiple platforms (desktop, CAVE, and web). It relies on a comprehensive database that merges archaeological and archaeometric knowledge about the site and the findings.