The knowledge about the technical capabilities and possible solutions enabled the international working group to establish standards for implementing digital technologies to visualise archaeological heritage. The standards for digital reconstruction in archaeological heritage are published in digital form.
In the course of the Virtual Archaeological Landscapes of the Danube Region project (Danube’s Archaeological eLandscapes), co-financed by the Danube Transnational programme, partners from 10 countries focused on making state-of-the-art digital visualisations of archaeological heritage, with an emphasis on archaeological landscapes.

In October 2021, the partnership adopted a strategy named sustainable touristic value from digitising archaeological heritage: Digital approaches to promoting archaeological landscapes in the Danube region. The strategy proposes a unique workflow for making digital visualisations, one which considers archaeological, technological and social questions that need to be tackled during the process of making such visualisations.

In September 2021, an international working group for the development of standards was formed by experts from the partnership. Tasks of the working group included evaluations of the four Industry Forums, which were organised within the scope of the project by project partners from Hungary (November 2021), Slovenia (April 2022), Romania (June 2022) and Slovakia (October 2022). The forums focused on presentations of various possibilities for the digital presentation of cultural (archaeological) heritage.

The evaluations, together with the lessons learned by the partners when applying the workflow from the strategies in their visualisations, formed the basis for these standards. The standards consist of four main parts. First is the presentation of the most relevant international strategies, charters and other relevant documents that deal with various aspects of digitally presenting cultural (and thus archaeological) heritage.

The second and third chapters are strongly connected to the workflow proposed in the above strategies. With the help of the Industry Forum evaluations and the partners’ responses to the workflow, the second chapter presents guidelines for using the workflow. In the third chapter, practical examples of the work through the workflow stages are presented by the project partners involved in making the visualisations. In the final part of the document, the practical examples from the third chapter are analysed, and recommendations for each stage are put forward.

An additional component of the final chapter is an analysis of time spent making the visualisations by our Croatian partners. Together with the strategies, these standards form a set of two documents that present, promote and evaluate the workflow for creating digital visualisations of archaeological heritage, as seen from the partnership of the Danube’s Archaeological eLandscape project.

https://issuu.com/danubes_archaeological_elandscapes/docs/standards_a4_12_2022

Published by: Institute for the Protection of  Cultural Heritage of Slovenia for the Danube´s Archaeological eLandscapes partners
Editor: Nejc Dolinar, Michael Doneus, 
Martin Fera, Aenna Linzbauer, 
Nika Lužnik-Jancsary, Marko Mele, Matija Črešnar.
Proofreading: Andrew Lamb