Digital betrayals: "translating" the ancient drawings of the Monastery of Nossa Senhora da Rosa
Submitted: 2025-02-12
|Accepted: 2025-06-30
|Published: 2025-08-22
Copyright (c) 2025 Virtual Archaeology Review
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Keywords:
cultural heritage, documentation, 3D reconstruction, interpretation, ancient drawings
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Abstract:
The research described in this paper used digital technologies to study the ethical and philosophical implications related to the analysis and interpretation of historical sources of cultural heritage. As the described technologies used are not neutral tools, they actively shape heritage narratives, influencing how we perceive and represent the past. Thus, reconstructing the past through heritage fragments cannot be objective or universally accepted, as it is inherently shaped by contemporary social, cultural, and political contexts. The past, therefore, can only be analysed from the unique perspective of the present. In this regard, the American historian David Lowenthal suggests “the past is a foreign country,” and therefore, its language, customs, and traditions cannot be fully understood. Since heritage is irreconcilable with the past, or more precisely —quoting Lowenthal again—since heritage is a “distortion” of the past, cultural heritage studies should combat those simulacra that define the past as objective, unambiguous, and unquestionable—definitions often protected by academia. The case study this paper focuses on is the Monastery of Nossa Senhora da Rosa of the Order of São Paulo da Serra de Ossa (Caparica, Portugal). It represents an opportunity to reflect on the ambiguity implicit when reading historical sources, always involving a certain interpretive and creative component. Borrowing the semiotic concept of translation, it is possible to say that reading any source is comparable to translating a document from an obscure and mysterious “language”, that of the past, to the contemporary world “language”. During the process of transferring word meanings from one language to another, many nuances inevitably end up being twisted, lost, or otherwise altered. Consequently, “translating” the drawing into the real building (as well as into a virtual replica) is, to use a famous 16thcenturyanalogy, a sort of “betrayal,” a departure from the initial idea represented on the sheet. This is particularly pertinent when the building no longer exists, as is the case with the Monastery of Nossa Senhora da Rosa. What are the limits of interpretation, its criteria, and the freedom that the "reader/interpreter" can take? What is the role of digital technologies in this theoretical framework? This research, rather than extolling the photorealistic results of digital heritage visualisations and their uniqueness, focuses on the process that led to certain interpretations, emphasising their subjective and context-dependent aspects.
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