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Euro-Mediterranean Conference

EuroMed 2020: Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection pp 400–411Cite as

Wandering in the Labyrinth - Enhancing the Accessibility to the Minoan Past Through a Visitor-Sourced Approach

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12642))

Abstract

Arising on the island of Crete around 2700 BC, the Minoans are traditionally regarded as the first advanced civilization on the European continent in its modern meaning. The safeguarding of this primordial heritage faces multiple challenges. Besides extrinsic natural and anthropic threats, Minoan remains are also jeopardized by some of their own intrinsic properties. This paper aims to address two of these hazards: first, the preservation state of Minoan sites, leading to their restricted comprehension; secondly, their complex, “labyrinthine”, architecture, further limiting this intelligibility but also challenging the physical access to the remains. The on-going research presented here intends to instrumentalize pathways as a solution to these drawbacks: it seeks to demonstrate that paths can not only be used as mobility vectors to guide and control visitors’ movement but also, when context-aware, as interpretation media to improve on-site experience. Drawing upon phenomenological theories, this paper focusses in particular on the integration of the visitors’ interaction with their surrounding as an innovative approach in the design of such well-informed paths. Based on the outcome of an original experiment conducted among 73 participants on the archaeological site of Malia, this study explores the possibilities of a combined qualitative and quantitative analysis of the visitors’ movement in informing recommendations to increase the visitors’ understanding and orientation abilities on site. The visitors-based approach discussed in this paper is only but one of the three axes to be combined in the general workflow advocated for the formalization of curated visitors’ paths on Minoan archaeological sites.

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References

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a F.R.S.-FNRS FRESH grant. We would like to thank Prof. Alexandre Farnoux, then director of the French School at Athens, for permission to conduct our research at Malia, as well as the staff of the archaeological site for their support and warm welcome. We are also greatly indebted to the 73 visitors who kindly accepted to take part in this survey. Finally, we address special thanks to Dr. Athanasios Argyriou, at the Institute of Mediterranean Studies (IMS) – FORTH, for his guidance in processing the data and to our PhD supervisors, Prof. Jan Driessen, at the UCLouvain, Dr. Eleni-Eva Toumbakari, at the Greek Ministry of Culture, for their continuous help and valuable comments on early versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology and Art History, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Thérèse Claeys

  2. Earth and Life Institute, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    François Clapuyt

Authors
  1. Thérèse Claeys
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  2. François Clapuyt
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Correspondence to Thérèse Claeys .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus

    Marinos Ioannides

  2. Arlington, VA, USA

    Eleanor Fink

  3. USI – Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

    Lorenzo Cantoni

  4. Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia

    Erik Champion

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Claeys, T., Clapuyt, F. (2021). Wandering in the Labyrinth - Enhancing the Accessibility to the Minoan Past Through a Visitor-Sourced Approach. In: Ioannides, M., Fink, E., Cantoni, L., Champion, E. (eds) Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection. EuroMed 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12642. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73043-7_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73043-7_33

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-73042-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-73043-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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