DIGITAL DIGS

摘要

Archaeologists are bringing past worlds vividly to life on the computer screen. But are the high-tech graphics helping science, or are they just pretty pictures? There's more than one way to sink a ship, as Donald Sander s knows. President of the Institute for the Visualization of History in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Sanders spends a lot of his time repeatedly sinking a vessel off the coast of Cyprus. The ship isn't real - it's a computer model of a vessel that sank in the fourth century BC. Sanders is trying to recreate what happened when the ship went down, leaving nearly 500 intact amphorae, or storage vessels, to be found centuries later on the sea floor. By loading his ship with a virtual crew and cargo, then sinking it in a number of different potential disasters, Sanders hopes to find a sequence of events that closely matches the archaeological evidence, and so work out might have happened centuries ago.