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CINCINNATI (AP) - Kathy Choi touches a kiosk screen, then looks up at a larger wall screen to see digitally created yellowish-brown mounds snaking through bright green grassland dotted with brilliant blue rivers and lakes. The ancient earthworks in the Ohio River Valley now are grass- and tree-covered mounds and walls diminished by development, floods and agriculture. But she's seeing them as they might have looked 2,000 years ago, by way of a computerized fly-over. "It makes it all seem more real," said Choi, 59, of Covington, Ky., maneuvering her way through the Cincinnati Museum Center's interactive video tour of Fort Ancient and other earthworks.
Archaeologists and historians agree. Museums, educators and others are increasingly using video, animation, graphics and other technology to depict historical sites beyond what text, maps and drawings offer.
On a virtual tour of an 18th-century American Indian village in North Dakota, visitors can enter an earthen lodge and hear sound effects as the animated figure of a woman scrapes a deer hide. The Archaeology Technologies Laboratory at North Dakota State University used 3-D computer visualizations to re-create the On-A-Slant village of the Mandan, a tribe that inhabited the Plains area.
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