A Virtual History of Mauritius

Abstract

Mauritius has a lot of cultural heritage sites that, until recently, have escaped our notice. It is only recently that archaeologists have started making excavations to gather more information on these sites. This would eventually be used to rehabilitate these sites but real reconstructions pose many problems: do we have sufficient funds to do so? What happens if insufficient information has been gathered, thereby resulting in an inaccurate reconstruction? The aim of this paper is to present another way of rehabilitating cultural sites that is cheap while offering numerous advantages over real reconstructions: Virtual Reconstructions. Historical reconstruction of the Aapravasi Ghat and the Grand Port Naval Battle will be considered and finally some preliminary work that has already been carried out will be presented.

Keywords: Virtual Heritage, Virtual Reality, Archaeology, Mauritius