Although, as Professor Barrett points out, there are still limitations to how the modern, conditioned individual approaches ancient spaces. Regardless, the hope of the project is to make their virtual reconstruction widely available to the public across digital platforms, garnering a larger array of responses and reactions from individuals of a range of backgrounds.
In the long term, the CRC Project hopes to share its growing corpus of digital ancient objects— including furnishings, clothing, as well as the botanical reproductions from the garden itself— by contributing to the Digital Topiarius Project, a digital archive of ancient plants.
Open-access databases such as these not only benefit other scholars, but also provide resources for digital design students, artists, and video game developers, allowing for the creation of reconstructions that can be enjoyed and learned from by all.
*Caitie E. Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics, Cornell University; Kathryn Gleason, Professor of Landscape Architecture, Cornell University; Annalisa Marzano, Professor of Classical Achaeology, Università di Bologna