 Well, thank you very much for inviting me to speak here and I'm not an archeologist, I'm an architect by trade and I'm responsible for one part of the Archeological Park which is everything to do with architecture but also with presentation and I would like to talk about the experiences of the last 40 years of communicating scholarly results at the Alfa Archeological Park at Xanten to a wider audience. Now the Archeological Park is located some hundred kilometers north of Cologne at the banks of the River Rhine. It used to be a major Cologne and Roman times and part of what I'm doing is how we get the message across and the Inamistrata in its preamble actually states that of Sey, which is people deciding on the Inamistrata, they implicitly acknowledge that every act of heritage conservation within all the world's cultural traditions is by its nature a communicative act. So we talk about how to get the message across. Now communication means there are a number, a series of transitional processes so from the fact that the very beginning to what's ending up in the mind of the person visiting a site and the first transformation process is actually that we have facts. I know there's a discussion going on in archeology about facts or non-facts but we have facts, we have some skeletons, we have some masonry, we have some pottery in the ground and then the scholar looks at it and there's a filter in between which is the mind of the scholar which is his pre-existing knowledge which is his experience, his background, the way he looks at things and depending on what he knows or he doesn't know he can make a lot of what he's actually looking at or he can make less of it. Now these things change through time 100 years ago this was a perception what actually happened in Roman baths. So it was Alma Tadema and good word, they had some ideas of sets, life in a Roman bath. Now 100 years later my predecessor reconstructed the hostel bath at Xanthen and it looks much more sober. It's still colorful but it was much more sober than what good what in Alma Tadema been talking about. Now it's not just changing throughout time, it's also that different scholars may look at the same thing in a different way. 2007 to 2014 I did a reconstruction project of three three craftsman houses at the Archeological Park and when we came up to the point of deciding on the interior decoration scheme I asked two scholars to do a design proposal how we should paint the walls and I ended up with asking two people, Britta Janssen and Michael Zelle, these are the two people over here, they together had done a lot of research on wall paintings from Xanthen. They've been looking at same boxes, they've been working alongside each other for years, they've been publishing a major volume on Roman wall painting at Xanthen and when they came up with a design scheme, Britta Janssen came up with a design scheme which is a whitewashed wall with very small red and black lines which is the cheapest possible way in Roman times to do wall paintings. It's iron oxide, rust and it's suit, the two cheapest pigments used in wall paintings. While Michael Zelle ended up with a very colorful scheme you see on the right side. Now fact is that from the very excavation side we have hardly any information so both of the scholars said we have to fill in the gaps with some information from another side and they came up with a different idea which as a side should actually take in consideration for deciding on a design scheme. Now how much you may actually be influenced by what you see day by day without ever realizing that this is influencing you, this is reconstruction by a life acres on Vindonissa. Now you see the porticoes, you see the street and you see Roman houses behind the porticoes and just 15 minutes outside of Vindonissa you passed this building and suddenly you come up with how did he came up with this idea how Roman houses may have looked like. So you had Wolfgang von Goethe put it this way, you only see what you know and this has a double meaning. If you don't know anything about what you're looking at you may overlook something that's there but on the other hand if you know exactly what you're going to find you may also overlook something that's there. Now once you have an idea in the mind of the scholar what he's actually looking at then he needs to use some media to get the message across. This could be reconstruction drawings, could be visualization, full-scale reconstruction computer modeling, text, lectures whatsoever but in between there's once again a filter which are financial restrictions, limited skills, lack of knowledge, verbal inaccuracies, lack of time, conservation aspects, building regulations all these sort of things. Another example is this is a prevailing conservation attitude from the late 1940s in the 1950s early 1960s. The Ida Pinakwate in Munich. This building was damaged in World War II and the center part was missing. So following the conservation ethics at this point of time you fill in the missing bits in order to have a still functional building and the main structure still there but the detailing that's missing. So you don't have the semicircular columns between the windows and all the detailing missing is just plain brickwork. Now following this conservation idea my predecessor Gundolf Brecht, he said the limitations of reconstruction based upon excavated archaeological remains are dictated by this count notch of the super structure which applies just one to careful obstruction and the renunciation of all detailing. So he was a scholar of this conservation attitude which was common standard at this point of time which ended up with history construction of the harbour gate half and two. You see now that we know the widths of the gate because the two stone blocks you see at a base that have been found on-site but we didn't find a single waswar, no stone from the arch. So he said if we don't know the detailing of this arch we just do plain stones. No details whatsoever. To be honest we should expect something like this. Of course we don't know the exact detailing but we know from a lot of Roman archers this is the sort of arch we should expect in one or the other way at such a gate. Now I certainly do not claims that my predecessor were anywhere close to Nazi architecture but this is the Reichsparteitaggelende Nürnberg and you suddenly realize that there's a certain monumentality, a certain plain facade, a certain straightforward idea of massive building and a visitor passing the building not being educated in architectural history, not being educated in Roman archeology, it just takes in an image which is wrong, which is certainly wrong but it's just the result of a conservation attitude which was correct. Now another example, out of the entire area of the Roman city we've just excavated some 15 to 18% to date. All the blank spaces are not excavated so far. How are we going to communicate this? The first reconstruction drawings done in 1970s actually show this is what we know and that's what we don't know and the first scale model that was built to be presented to the public was made in the same way. Ending up with our visitors asking why did the Romans build such a large defensive wall if it don't have any evidence in there. Now one of the first computer-generated models done by the University of Dortmund, it just reconstructed one of the insolent and then it multiplied to cover the entire area of the city with these insolent so give an idea of a densely built-out area which is very strange in a way but most of the people now understood this is densely built up and now unhappy this is uniform appearance our draft person within our team he came up with this handmade image of the Roman city which is more colorful, it has tiled roofs and slayed roofs and some spaces in between not built up which was an image we used for quite a long time and the most recent computer-generated model which was more with it more differentiated but still not based on facts and the model I love most is actually this one when we decided to have everything we don't know but we just assume that all these insolent being built up with houses we do in white color and where we actually have excavation results and we can do a statement on what has been there we do in colored reconstructed houses in this model. So this helps in communicating saying okay this is the idea of a completely densely built-up city but only the colored bits we really know. Now another problem that may happen when my British Reconstructed the baths at a hospital at Xanthan that he had to recreate a basin that works that contains water and not knowing how to do it there were two possibilities asking the producer of swimming pool paint he got two colors away a lot which is light blue you all know and red. Deciding that light blue is worse than red. He came up with the red swimming pool color available on the market and in Secaduno at the end of Adrian's wall in England they came to our side to look at how we done it and say copied of course this red color and also added some glass panels for health and safety regulations. In reconstructing the craftsman's buildings the planning permission asked us to have a door between two individual houses within the reconstruction compound and for fire regulations that you have two stairs available in case of one of the stairs being blocked by fire. Now the idea we came up with was painting this doorway in a great color and adding a sign saying in three languages this is a modern passage necessary for fire escape route didn't exist in Roman times and this is a color scheme we do in the entire archaeological park by now that everything that's new doesn't have any colors it's black it's white it's gray or shades of gray and sink metal concrete and everything that's with color actually represents something Roman. Now once you get all your ideas into a message there's a visitor who takes on this message and needs to create an image in his mind and once again there is a filter in between his knowledge the pre-existing knowledge the experience in the background of the visitor and if you say house it doesn't necessarily means that all your visitors have the same idea as you actually wanted to put into this work. One of the examples I would like to show you says a stair going down to a basement room and for health and safety regulations we had to fit in a rail to prevent people from falling down the stairs. So my predecessor said how I'm going to fix this wooden rail to the column not knowing how to do it he came up with an idea which is from garden technology that we have a U- shaped metal brace and a circular pin usually you take it in the garden using some wooden elements to prevent the water soaking up and he said obviously this is modern everyone will recognize this as a modern added element when I came up to a toy fair looking at a scale model of this Roman officer and I was just passing by stopped and said why did you do it? Well you know I went to the Archaeological Park and something they did it and so it must be wrong so talking to people trying to get the message across there's so many pitfalls on the way where you can actually go wrong so it's difficult to show what you know and it's even more difficult to show what you do not know and this is one of the tasks we discussing every day anew in the Archaeological Park in an ever-changing society in ever-changing media consumption with young people nowadays how do we actually get the message across and we do work on this topic day for day eight hours ten hours whatsoever so to us everything is logical everything is clear as everything is obvious to them it's not and trying to get a common language to communicate is quite an effort well thank you very much