(Chair: Hansjörg THALER, Italy)
Different concepts are hidden behind this definition. In contrast to the visible modern city, many sites are recordable, there are partially reconstructed historical improvements in their successive development phases, through mostly sketchy archaeological excavations. Frequently there are missing cities, well known from different sources, wrong identified or some even without a name, only identified by their typological structure, results and finds and comparable only statistically .
It is possible by connecting new scientific technologies with traditional methods to get new images of such cities.
Through that and by fitting together visible, invisible or only partially visible elements lost cities could probably be recovered.
So the risk grows to fictional and not real interpretation by trying reconstructions.
Hypothesis could be nevertheless undertaken, if the intentions will be shown settled between facts, personal projection and interpretation.
They could become to favourite fantasy products to utopian archaeology like Atlantis, Utopia, Eldorado, the discussion about Troy and more.
More about it we should interact with attempts of reconstructions. During the last century, different national archaeological schools modelled with different philosophies, like the
French school in Delphi, the German’s in Olympia, the British in Knossos, the Italian’s in Pompeji.
There are now new possibilities of reconstruction models because of the development and application of virtual reality.
New trends should be considered, that different studies highlighted: Addition, Subtraction, Reconstruction, Conservation, Provocation, Deconstruction, New Composition, Simulation, Adoption, Update and others.
The Session “Lost Cities” should not only be a pure reconstruction of cities or part of them with newest technologies or the search of missing towns, but it should also contain some discussions of the different models perhaps with some philosophy and a nuance of utopia.