I love old ruins, as you surely know. Whenever I find myself walking amongst them, or even just in old streets of modern cities, my mind is only half focused on what I see. The other half sees what these places were in their prime. Makes it a bit of a chore to avoid traffic…

But there is nothing like watching proper archaeologists and historians recreate what originally stood there. Here are a couple of such recreations. I posted these links originally on my Facebook page, but since these tend to get buried in the mists of time rather quickly, I thought I’d put the links here for easier future reference.

The first is a video made by Altair4 group, which I found through a post on Mr P’s World History Emporium. The video is only 15 minutes, and deals with houses from cities outside of Rome. I love how they’ve done the present-to-past transformation, taking a ruined wall as it looks today and overlaying the image of how it looked new. (You can also find the video on YouTube here).

If you search for their channel they have a lot of other snippets. Here is a link to a full half-hour of drool-worthy animated Roman architecture:

Another great recreation, this one with narration explaining what you see, if on the Sci-New site. An international team of researchers led by Lund University archaeologists has virtually reconstructed a large house of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, a banker from Pompeii. You can find the article and video here. I heartily recommend putting on your headphones and listening well, as they explain a lot of details about the house and the lives of the people who lived in it.

You can find the original article with some extra notes here, or watch the video directly on YouTube: