The Art of Making in Antiquity: Stoneworking in the Roman World is aimed at a diverse audience and designed to enable anyone, and everyone, with an interest in art and its production to investigate the making of stone monuments. The material on the website has been broadly categorized by Monuments, Tools, Processes, Materials and Places. These provide the entry points for exploring the data contained within it. In addition there are Collections which consist of sets of images assembled by Peter Rockwell during the organization of his physical archive. There are also some curated by the Project Team.
The categories are first encountered on the carousel of the Home page and are also available on the menu bar.
The Explore page is another starting point for investigating the content.
The interface is visual throughout the website creating an easy and pleasing navigation. At the bottom of the Explore page are images from the digital catalogue giving the viewer a sense of the range of pictures and encourage serendipitous or spontaneous engagement.
The category pages –one example is Tools– list the main content with, at the bottom, the option to ‘Show All’ or ‘Show More’ where available. In each case there is the opportunity to filter these categories by type, helping the user to understand how the material has been organized and quickly access what they are looking for.
Places is slightly different, displaying a map with the locations of monuments of which there are images in the database. By default the view is limited to the Mediterranean but zoom out and there are some comparative stone monuments, for example on Easter Island or in India.
Within the categories are the various entries which make them up. So within Monuments, for example, there is the Arch of Constantine in Rome. Here you will find a description of the arch along with the core metadata which record the type of monument, the material its made of and the date it was constructed. In this case there are also Sub-Parts to help navigation of the monument. Below is a map so that it is geographically contextualized.
At the bottom of the page are all the source images relating to it. These can be browsed or filtered, in this case by the tool or process used.
Click on one of the thumbnails and you come to a source page, for example PR210_03_09. This is an individual catalogue entry where all the data for each image is stored and made accessible. On the left hand side is the image itself with the annotations highlighted. Click on an area to bring up the description, on the right hand side, of the evidence for working practices. There are various view options and it is possible, if you wish, to turn the annotations off. The images can be made larger and also downloaded (see the Copyright page). Below is all the information relating to that image which, like the other metadata, is linked together. At the bottom of the page are the related images which can be browsed or filtered.
As you explore, any pages with content, such as a monument or tool, or any of the images can be saved to the Workspace. You should register an account after which you can create collections that can be edited or shared. Your own collections can also be produced from an Advanced Search. This facility can be found in the top right hand corner of the page.
Above it is the Basic Search which is a keyword search across all the text in the website. On the menu bar you will also find links to Essays & Videos and also News, which includes future Events. At the bottom right there is Information For different visitors to the website and also About the project. We hope you will enjoy exploring The Art of Making in Antiquity: Stoneworking in the Roman World.
More suggestions for using the website have been prepared under the following categories of visitor:
Researchers & Students – Museum Professionals – Artists
We welcome feedback.