Recording and Reconstructing the Sacred Landscapes of Sicilian Naxos

The on-going project on the urban landscape of Naxos has over the years surveyed and produced several new digital reconstructions of the settlement’s simple non-peripteral temples, most with highly decorative roofs. Three Archaic sacred buildings of Sicilian Naxos are used to demonstrate different approaches into recording the remains and architectural reconstruction, and they also reflect changes in digital strategies over the past ten years. Tempietto H is a small shrine outside the city boundaries and the site is currently inaccessible, so the reconstruction is based on the excavation documentation and roof terracottas. The visible half of Tempietto C was documented using three-dimensional line-drawing with total stations and photogrammetry; the back-filled south-western part was surveyed with ground penetrating radar. Temple B is the largest sacred structure of Naxos. The geophysical survey gives new data on the eastern extent of the sanctuary. The area has been recorded with handheld and aerial photography to create a three-dimensional model of the sanctuary. New orthogonal grid of the city was established circa 470 BCE and a rectangular base was placed in the south-east corner of every crossroad. These bases were the starting point of laying out the plan, and interpreting them as altars converts the entire urban plan into a sacred landscape.