GNCP Field Project (Greece)
Natalie Susmann poses with the drone in front of the Herakles Pyre in July, 2025.
Dr. Natalie Susmann, Head of the Digital Scholarship Lab, is applying her BDI skill set write a book about ancient Greek mountain sanctuaries. Her book, Sanctuaries up High: Unlocking Sacred Auras, Movement, and Memory in the Mountains of Greece, explores different sensory experiences evoked by worshiping on mountains in hills in ancient Greece. In 2025, she flew BDI's DJI Mav 5 to collect photogrammetry data at two sites: at the Herakles Pyre on Mount Oiti, and at the Twin Temples in Arcadia. She's using the data to create high-resolution Digital Elevation Models of each sanctuary's landscape. With the help of BDI's new High Performance Workstation, she is working on two different analyses for the book. One will model smoke emitted from the Herakles Pyre and measure whether nearby ancient settlements could have seen it. The second analysis measures feasible walking paths between the Twin Temples and the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae.