The Late Antiquity Modeling Project (LAMP) is a Digital Humanities collective, comprised of myself, a Ph.D. student in Ancient Christianity at Yale University, and Joshua Silver, a Masters of Architecture student at the University of Toronto, that is dedicated to reconstructing ancient ritual spaces from their archaeological remains. Over the summer, LAMP won a DigitalGlobe Foundation imagery grant to create a three-dimensional reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian necropolis site, El Bagawat. LAMP’s ultimate aim in reconstructing the architectural landscape of El Bagawat is to elucidate the embodied worship practices that occurred at the site between the between the third– and seventh–century CE.
In the first module of the project, the focus will be on synthesizing existing archaeological data with methods of architectural analysis to reconstruct each of El Bagawat’s approximately 263 mud-brick mausolea and their decorative elements and facades and locate them within the complex natural landscape of the site. By processing DigitalGlobe’s high-resolution panchromatic, multispectral and stereo satellite images using Hexagon Geospatial’s Erdas Imagine Software, LAMP will verify the survey data produced by the original archaeological site report and rectify errors using ARCGIS. This data then will be further analyzed to create a highly detailed two-dimensional drawing set of El Bagawat’s mausolea in AutoCAD. Currently, all the available topographic data for the area is taken at too large an interval to develop accurate enough contours for three-dimensional modeling. Thus, in order to transition from working in two-dimensions into three, LAMP will need to use the DigitalGlobe Foundation’s stereo imagery of the area to create a detailed digital elevation model of El Bagawat. From here, LAMP will begin to process its satellite imagery using Photoscan to produce three-dimensional renderings of El-Bagawat’s structures.
In the second module of the project, LAMP will shift its attention to analyzing the interiors of the structures. Careful attention will be paid to the two monumental complexes at the site which show the most significant evidence for Christian adaptation of “Pagan” space for ritual use. Using high-resolution satellite imagery, processes of the mausolea’s construction and adaption, which the original survey overlooked, will be identified and documented. Tracing these processes of renovation to El Bagawat’s buildings will illuminate the evolution of early Christian architecture. LAMP hypothesizes that its findings will challenge the widely accepted evolutionary model for the development of early Christian ritual space.
El Bagawat contains many of the only pre-Constantinian Christian buildings which survive today. Thus, the site is key to reconstructing the development of early Christian architecture - a task of monumental importance to the field today. Despite the immense importance of the funerary complex to the archaeological and architectural record, minimal study of the site has taken place since it was surveyed over half-a-century ago. Thus, to understand how early Christians transitioned from worshipping in their homes to more monumental buildings, a systematic, interdisciplinary and contextualized study of El Bagawat’s architectural remains is imperative.