What was it like 鈥 on a personal, sensory level 鈥 to live in ancient Pompeii? Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an online model of a house and garden that stood in the much-excavated city in 79 CE will soon give virtual visitors insight into the answer.
Cornell researchers led by co-PIs , associate professor of classics in the 麻豆视频 and 麻豆视频, and , professor emerita of Landscape Architecture in the College of Agriculture and Life 麻豆视频, have received a $150,000 that is enabling them to create a 3D virtual modeling project based on the Casa della Regina Carolina, a large Pompeian house.
With an anticipated launch in spring 2026, the open-access model will allow users to navigate the house and garden. The team ultimately seeks to develop avatars that reflect historically accurate dress and body language and a wide range of embodied features, such as gender, age and degree of bodily ability. Users will choose interactive scenarios, including a dinner party in the living room or work in the garden.
Students from the will collaborate with students and faculty in a game design program at a French research institution, the Universit茅 Catholique de l鈥橭uest (Laval and Nantes), in partnership with the CNRS laboratory AOrOc in Paris, to create the model.
From 2018鈥2023, a joint Cornell University/University of Bologna team, co-directed by Barrett and Gleason at Cornell and Annalisa Marzano at the University of Bologna, has documented the house and excavated its garden area. The specific aim of the has been to construct a richer, more multidisciplinary and more inclusive account of the ways that built space shaped Roman domestic life, said the researchers.
In 2020, the National Geographic Society recognized Barrett鈥檚 studies of daily life in ancient Rome, in support of her efforts.
The virtual model, created with excavation data, LiDAR scanning and integrated 3D Geographic Information Systems, will give further insight into the ways that people of different genders, ages and physical conditions would have experienced domestic space.
鈥淥lder studies of Pompeian houses typically centered the experiences of the wealthy male property owners, but our project uses innovative archaeological and virtual modeling methods to explore the diversity of people who would have lived and worked in these ancient dwellings, including women, children, elderly relatives and the enslaved,鈥 Barrett said. 鈥淩ather than assuming everyone responded to the same spaces in the same way, we emphasize that individuals brought different bodies, perceptions, emotions, and memories to bear on their experiences. We center this diversity and assert that it is crucial to the ways we make meaning out of our lives and those of others.鈥
In the past 20 years, there has been an increasing push for archaeologists to address the lived experience of the people who once dwelled in the spaces they excavate and to investigate their sensations and emotions, Barrett said. But this is hard to do without bias.
鈥淲hen attempting to access ancient experiences of a place, the imagined 鈥榓ncient individual鈥 becomes a mirror of the scholar,鈥 she said. 鈥淎nd given historical structural imbalances within academia, that has often meant privileging the experiences of male, white, able-bodied, upper-middle-class adults over others.鈥
Barrett proposes that virtual modeling can help create richer, more inclusive accounts of ancient experience.
鈥淏y running simulations within a virtual environment, we are not tied to an individual project director鈥檚 subjective perceptions,鈥 she said. 鈥淲e can investigate how people with different embodied identities might navigate a particular space. In exploring the agency of the material world, we ultimately seek to investigate some of the most profoundly human aspects of life at Pompeii: the daily experiences, activities and sensations that constituted people鈥檚 lives.鈥
Within the next two years, the project team aims to publish an online model of the house and garden, complete with an open-access website where scholars and members of the public can navigate the 3D virtual model under a range of conditions.
By spring 2026, Barrett plans to use the virtual model as a teaching tool in courses on Roman archaeology, in connection with Cornell鈥檚 .
The project team will also publish its database of archaeological field data, as well as a book synthesizing the archaeological findings with the digital modeling results.
Seed grants from Cornell have supported this project from the beginning: a grant from the supported the NEH grant application, and an supported the earliest stages of the digital project.
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