Calculating the Costs of Ancient Buildings: A Modern Tool

FAIN: FA-252561-17

Federico Buccellati
Alexandria Archive Institute, Inc. (San Francisco, CA 94127-2036)

The creation of an interpretive digital tool and user manual to study cost calculations for ancient buildings.

Architecture is one of the main elements of material culture that archaeologists find in the archaeological record. One of the most important aspects of architecture is the process of construction leading up to the first use of the building. Cost-calculation-algorithms can be applied to the volumes of ancient architecture to explore the temporal, material or energetic ‘cost’ of the steps of that process. Up to now this has been done on an ad-hoc basis, with scholars finding appropriate comparisons. This project will produce an interactive interface where scholars enter volumetric data from their research. The algorithms draw from a wide variety of sources from across diverse cultural spheres. The final result will be a web-based interface published on GitHub so that future scholars can add to the algorithms and sources.

Associated Products