Digital-twin technology could be an archaeologist's most powerful tool

This article is part of "5G and Connectivity Playbook," a series exploring some of our time's most important tech innovations.

Before the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, a building near one of Pompeii's south gates was a bustling hub. Artisans crafted baskets and maps, and the structure's communal space was home to gatherings and restaurants. The people who worked in the building — some of whom were enslaved — likely lived there.

"We've got a lot of businesses operating in the same space," Allison Emmerson, an archeologist and associate professor at Tulane University, told Business Insider. "While we're digging this up, we're thinking about the lives of the lower classes of Pompeii — not just at the time of the eruption but throughout the city's history."

Emmerson leads the multidisciplinary, international team excavating this building. She's the director of the Pompeii I.14 Project, a collaboration between the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Tulane University, Oxford University, and Indiana State University that started in 2021. The project's focus is a city block, Insula 14, on the southeastern side of Pompeii. Its researchers are interested in the margins of the Roman city: both its literal physical edge and the marginalized residents who lived there.

The Pompeii I.14 Project is one of a growing number of archeological endeavors using interconnected technology to better understand and preserve the past. While technology has always been an essential part of the field, how archeologists collect, record, and analyze findings has advanced as tech has progressed.

One way researchers are applying these innovative tools is by creating a digital twin: a detailed virtual counterpart of a real-life entity. People in various trades, including city planning and car design, are increasingly using digital twins. While the process of creating digital twins can differ, these computerized 3D replicas can give researchers a more dynamic look at what they're studying, enable greater collaboration, and facilitate a remarkable level of preservation.

Building a digital twin

The Pompeii digital twin, which combines geospatial technology with a rich repository of data collected at the site, lets researchers examine the area from their universities, collaborate remotely with other researchers, and visualize how it has changed over time.

"Having the digital twin makes it an entirely new ball game," Emmerson said. "It really allows us to go back as if we're in the excavation."

Alex Badillo, an assistant professor at Indiana State University, is the Pompeii project's head of digital data initiatives. Before the excavation, Badillo and the other members of the digital team used drone imagery, photos, and structure-from-motion photogrammetry — a technique for turning 2D images into 3D models — to create a scaled and georeferenced replica of the Pompeii city block.

Over time, the information gathered by the archeological team working at the site has made this model more detailed and dynamic. This data is what transforms the 3D model into a digital twin: The design changes based on what the team learns through excavation. Unlike static 3D models, digital twins include an evolving set of data and the means to update and adjust the model based on new information.

To get this information, Badillo implemented a digital workflow at the dig site. The Pompeii site team used iPad Pro tablets to record data, take photos, 3D scan, and digitally sketch their findings. That information is saved in custom digital forms on the iPad and sent to cloud storage when the researcher has access to WiFi or a cell network. From there, it's added to an online dashboard used by the entire team.

"If someone is digging in the trench and they're wondering what was analyzed from the deposit yesterday, they can go to the iPad they have in the field and pull up all of that information," Emmerson said.

Badillo told BI that the information gathered on the iPad — data like structure measurements, soil characteristics, and artifacts found — is added to the 3D model. Together, these components make the digital twin, which archeologists can use to revisit, explore, and analyze the site. After the 3D model is complete, Badillo and his team will continue this workflow at the next dig.

"You can move through the web scene, and if forms have been filled out for that location, you can click to get extremely detailed information," Badillo said. "Being able to look level by level, make measurements — it's all been a game changer."

Benefits of digital twins

One of the major advantages of digital twins is the ability to examine site elements exactly as they appeared during the initial excavation.

Giles Spence Morrow, a research fellow at Vanderbilt University and an assistant professor at McMaster University, began a digital-twin project in 2011 focused on Huaca Colorada, a ceremonial mound built and occupied between AD 650 and 1,000 in Peru.

Like Badillo, Morrow uses photogrammetry to create the site's digital twin. "The availability of these models allows us to revisit particular moments in time throughout the excavation, either through the screen of our computers or more recently through immersive virtual-reality and augmented-reality interfaces," he said.

Morrow collaborates with Steven Wernke, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, on digital-twin technology. Wernke's research is also based in Peru and centers on Mawchu Llacta, an Andean colonial town built in the 1570s. Wernke has also combined 3D imagery with archeological information gathered at his research site to make a digital twin.

Through their collaboration, Morrow and Wernke are investigating how digital twins can be augmented through immersive virtual reality. Morrow said they used VR headsets to view their digital twins from a first-person perspective, something that's possible only with strong internet connectivity.

Wernke said that exploring digital twins through virtual reality was "as close as we can come to reproducing the feeling or experience" of being at their field sites. When Morrow and Wernke use VR headsets to examine their digital twins, they can leave notes, markups, and maps within the VR scene.

"The value of this kind of detailed 3D, immersive documentation is hard to overstate, because excavation is an inherently destructive process," Morrow said.

The unavoidable destruction of an excavation site is partly why Jamie Hodgkins, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, and her team were interested in creating a digital twin of a burial site within an Italian cave. They digitally re-created the oldest documented European burial of an infant female, a child who died nearly 10,000 years ago. The interactive 3D model preserves the burial as they found it.

The team took dozens of photos of each delicate skeleton piece as it was discovered. "By the end, we had thousands of images of all the skeleton pieces," Caley Orr, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who coauthored the study, told BI.

"This let us reconstruct the burial digitally and see in 3D how it was laid out underground," Orr said. "But we never saw it that way in real life because it revealed itself as we went through each layer of dirt."

Expanding the field

Hodgkins told BI that digital twins could become more common in archeology. While they're valuable to working archeologists now, she said that part of what makes them so useful is how they could benefit the field over time.

Hodgkins said past archeological research lacked documentation of spatial relationships between artifacts. Without that information, she added, it can be difficult to understand how artifacts, remains, and other discoveries relate to each other.

Digital twins could help bridge this gap and give researchers a way to look at field sites just as they found them. "You can never put an artifact back," Hodgkins said. "But if an archeologist 50 years from now wants to ask a question that we didn't think of, they can look at what we have, see the excavation as it was happening, and consider these spatial relationships."

Hodgkins is also part of a multiproject, transcontinental research consortium that aims to teach students how to collect site data to create digital twins. She said that if more people knew this technique, sites could be compared globally.

"What we want is to train future archeologists," Hodgkins said. "We won't really understand how humans were moving across the planet, how they were interacting with each other, and how the environment was affecting them unless we can compare data across sites."

"Digital twins can help us answer the big questions," she added. "But you can't create them if you don't collect the right kind of data."