Technological Challenges and Visitor Problems in Site Reconstruction: The Ancient Tombs Museum

Ancient Tomb is a unique museum with peculiar problems, weaknesses and opportunities of development: •the site is a special place where ancient tomb located in the Luoyang area have been moved (or copied) and open to the public, recreating the original aspect of the tombs underground. Therefore it is not exactly a museum neither an archaeological site, but something unique site in China and maybe in the whole world (at least when it was originally built); •the heritage is of particular interest both from the curatorial and the visitors point of view, but is characterized by serious preservation problems and has been left far behind his attractiveness to visitor; •research, conservation, restoration and exhibition are negatively affected by institutional jealousy and fragmentation; •as Luoyang Museum, a new developing project has bee recently carried out. The structure of this chapter is as follows: 1.a preliminary short reconstruction of the history of this institution is provided, from the establishment to the present situation of the museum; 2.an appreciation of the museum’s effectiveness will be carried on, in terms of both back office issues and visitors’ orientation; 3.aspects related to museums efficiency will be addressed, investigating both procedural and substantial issues in managing human & financial resources; 4.future development projects will be addressed and commented; 5.some final conclusions and implications will be searched for.