By: Mona Prufer

Students and faculty at Coastal Carolina University are making history by making history more accessible. Ashes2Art, a virtual tour of ancient sites with flash animation and panoramas, is changing the way students of many disciplines— art history, archaeology, engineering, graphic and Web design—view the past.

The ruins of the Tholos of the Athena Pronaia of Delphi

The brainchild of art history professor Arne Flaten and art professor Paul Olsen, Ashes2Art is a concept, a Web site, a class and a collaborative program. The professors worked with Coastal students to choose an ancient city such as Florence, Italy, or Delphi, Greece. They study its architectural history, visit the location in person and take photographs of crumbling monuments or sweeping, panoramic scenes. Returning to the classroom, they download the photos, rebuild the monuments digitally using sophisticated computer programs and, voilá, anyone with a computer can experience the Temple of Athena as it looked in the 4th century B.C.

And it's all done by undergraduate students.

Imagine being able to walk around the rain-soaked streets of Renaissance Florence and visit the Piazza Del Duomo. You can open the door to the Florentine Baptistry, go inside and view its magnificent mosaics, even study the floor plan. Then stroll across the piazza to the Santa Maria del Fiore, walk in and study how the massive cupola was constructed. It's all available on the Ashes2Art Web site that Coastal students have worked on since 2005, complete with historical essays about the monuments, buildings, sculpture and ancient sites, along with measurements and bibliographies for further reading.
Now in its second year, the class has shifted from Renaissance Italy to Delphi, Greece. Students visited Delphi last summer to take photographs of the ruins, including some that are not normally open to visitors. "We wanted to study ancient Delphi to introduce more three-dimensional reconstruction to structures that have never been digitally rebuilt," says Flaten.

Students Yaw Odame and Greg Schultz work on digital images for the Ashes2Art Web site.

In addition to a new area of study, the program has taken on a partner, Arkansas State University, in order to broaden the scope of the project. Using Coastal's model for the classroom, Alyson Gill, ASU professor and expert in classical Greece, and her students are digitally reconstructing the gymnasium, plunge bath and the Athenian Treasury. Coastal students are working on the Temple of Apollo, the Siphnian Treasury and the sanctuary of Athena Pronaia.
Once completed, the models will be shown to experts in the field, including excavation directors, who will assure the accuracy of the material and confer with students in a password-protected chat room. The Delphi portion of the site went up in July.

When the class first started last spring, 25 students were enrolled. "I told them this would be the most difficult and most time-consuming class they will take in college," says Flaten. "I wanted them to know what they were getting into. Very quickly we were down to 15."

Professor Arne Flaten (left) and student Brandon Lockett

Senior art student Christin Miesfeldt is one of the researchers who wrote about the general history of Delphi, the Siphnian Treasury and Tholos (temple). Meredith Thayer, a senior art studio major who is minoring in art history, is busy transferring two 180-degree photos into a three-dimensional movie. Andrea Hendrix works on an online sketch of the Athenian Treasury, and Yaw Odame is formulating a complex code for the Web site.

Greg Schultz, a senior graphic design major who rebuilt the Athena Pronaia, admitted to having "a lot of fun" working with three-dimensional architectural renditions, but doesn't think it will be a career choice for him even though he finds it "more exciting" than traditional graphic design projects.

Miesfeldt, who plans to enter the Peace Corps before applying to graduate school at American University in Washington, says the class has helped her work in group situations in which all the elements of such a massive undertaking are brought together.

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