The ancient Egyptian burial site of Saqqara has been studied for more than a century, due to the importance of the location for political, religious and architectural history. One of the country’s most popular tourist destinations, it is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

But a new “born-digital” publication by UC Santa Cruz associate history professor Elaine Sullivan takes a fresh look at the region to demonstrate how the site has evolved over more than 2,500 years. 

Titled Constructing the Sacred: Visibility and Ritual Landscape at the Egyptian Necropolis of Saqqara—it has just been published by Stanford University Press, as part of their new series of monographs and scholarly publications.

Sullivan’s project uses 3D technologies to enhance Geographic Information Systems (GIS)--one of the prevalent formats for data organization in modern archaeology—in order to create interactive models that can be navigated through space and time to explore the Egyptian site.