The Domitilla Catacomb in Rome

The START-project Domitilla made an excellent contribution to the knowledge of the beginning and the development of Christian cemeteries in both the West and the East of the Roman Empire. The use of the 3D-Laserscanner technology, which was applied for the first time in such complex structures as the catacombs and could be brought to perfection for many specific questions, was a ground-breaking innovation. The teamwork of both archaeologists of the ÖAW and architects of the VTU enabled to document entire monuments in their architectural entity and with all their frescoes in highest precision, and to study them as photo-realistic 3D models. Thus, the most extended Roman catacomb and several similar monuments could be opened up for research as well as virtually for the public.The first aim of the project was to study the archaeology, the architecture and the art history of this largest underground cemetery of early Christian Rome. It was possible to trace its development from single pagan hypogeia in the 3rd to the large Christian community cemetery of the 4th century and further to the early medieval cult centre with the burials of martyrs in a half-subterranean pilgrims basilica. The stages of enlargement of the more than 12km grid of galleries, the development of the cubicula and the inscriptions as well as of the unique corpus of paintings fits perfectly within this image. With the extended use of digital formats the publications on the Domitilla catacomb have achieved a new standard for the future work.In the second half of the project, the new research method was extended to several similar monuments that could complement, due to their complex structure or their images, main questions of the catacomb research. The most important study became the research on the Cemetery of the Seven Sleepers at Ephesus and its identification as the first and oldest early Christian community cemetery in Asia Minor known so far. For the first time it was now possible to compare concepts and developments of early Christian burials in the West and the East of the Roman Empire. It was possible to show that, generally, the constructions, inscriptions and paintings are of similar character and follow the same principle of offering space for the burials of even the poor community members one important reason of the success of early Christianity.The Domitilla project carried out pioneer work in the field of virtual visualisation and elaboration of extremely big point clouds (3D-Laserscanner data). Inside the FFG-Project 825842 - FIT-IT Visual Computing TERAPOINTS - High Quality Visualization and Interaction with Gigantic Point Data Sets, our own 3D software Scanopy was further developed.