Musée Gallo-Romain de Saint-Romain-en-Gal
Large-Scale Archaeological Site Integration
Large-Scale Archaeological Site Integration
Spanning a seven-hectare archaeological park alongside its exhibition buildings, the Musée Gallo-Romain de Saint-Romain-en-Gal is one of Europe’s most ambitious combinations of in-situ ruins and modern museum infrastructure. Visitors move between the open-air remains of Roman houses, thermal complexes, workshops and public spaces, and elevated gallery pavilions built on stilts directly above the excavation.
That duality, exposed antiquities under a contemporary roof, brings real challenges: protecting the site while telling a layered story, managing an enormous amount of spatial data, and keeping active archaeological research compatible with a stable public exhibition. It’s the most complex of MNEME’s five pilots, testing how far the ECCCH platform can scale to support large-scale geospatial data, ongoing fieldwork, and immersive visitor experiences all at once.
What MNEME brings
High-resolution aerial photogrammetry and LIDAR scanning are building a centimeter-accurate terrain model of the park, while terrestrial 3D laser scanning captures the indoor galleries and stilted pavilions in detail. Individual artefacts, from mosaic fragments to fine wares, are being scanned into 3D meshes, and excavation records, stratigraphic drawings and radiocarbon dating results are being digitized and semantically annotated.
GIS services within MNEME index findspots, excavation zones and time phases, making it possible to reconstruct the Roman cityscape at different points in its history. OCRA tags areas of structural vulnerability across the pavilions and open-air features, and a WebXR AR application overlays historical reconstructions, such as the original bathhouse superstructure, directly onto today’s ruins.
The experience
On site, visitors follow a guided AR “Time-Walker” circuit: stepping into the former forum, a tablet or smartphone overlays the reconstructed civic buildings onto the excavated foundations, complete with animated figures and narrated daily life. Selecting an inscription in the forum can instantly surface comparable inscriptions from AMTh, showing shared epigraphic practices across the Roman world.
A gallery kiosk offers a temporal slider that morphs the 3D site model through its successive building phases, from first-century foundations to fourth-century expansion, alongside related Roman-period artefacts from Monteagudo. In parallel, a remote session lets archaeologists and heritage managers query the database (for example, all amphorae from a particular workshop) and see how new field data is folded into the evolving digital twin in real time.
Goals for this pilot
80%+ coverage of the accessible park and galleries in the 3D twin; 100 artefact findspots with complete metadata; 60%+ AR adoption during live demonstrations; 30+ semantic links to the Celje and Monteagudo collections; 20+ active remote research sessions; query responses under 3 seconds; three or more conservators contributing annotated reports; a 25% reduction in documentation time.