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The CyArk project is laser-scanning and digitising 500 of the world’s most at-risk heritage sites
Ben Kacyra, an Iraqi-born engineer and entrepreneur*,*wants to digitise the world’s most significant physical heritage. “As a child growing up in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, I often spent time exploring the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh with my father,” he says. “Looking back now, I can see that my father’s great passion for those ancient sites was the genesis for this project.”
Convinced that “digital preservation” could help to safeguard the world’s most threatened archaeological treasures, Kacyra founded CyArk, a non-profit venture. “What the Taliban did to the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 made me realise that nothing can replace those monuments, that past,” says Kacyra. “If we’d had some high-resolution 3D scans, they wouldn’t have been so completely obliterated from the Earth.”
Since its founding in 2002, CyArk has already digitised more than 30 sites. Its two dedicated surveyors have joined up with partners around the world, from universities to Unesco, to scan awe-inspiring ancient sites. They have hauled their scanners high into the cave dwellings of the Anasazi people in Colorado and carefully lowered them into dark, narrow tunnels deep inside Egyptian tombs. They’ve also scanned heritage sites such as the ruins of Pompeii, the Mayan temples in Guatemala and the Hindu temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
Their latest project, part of an agreement with INAH, the Mexican government’s heritage organisation, sent CyArk’s surveyors to the ancient site of Teotihuacán, the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas. Working with Mexican archaeologists, in two days they performed 28 scans with a Leica HDS6000 -- which slowly rotates through 360° to bounce laser beams back off anything solid in its range and registers some 50,000 data points every second. They collected 385 million data points that faithfully represent the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, a six-tier stone temple adorned with 33 carved snakeheads. “Each of those measurements represents a single point on the surface of the temple, the co-ordinates of which are known in relation to all others,” explains Kacyra. Together, all of these points make up a “point cloud” -- a raw, three-dimensional data set that provides a digital blueprint of the pyramid that can be explored from every angle.
All CyArk’s laser devices employ “time of flight” scanning -- the measuring of the almost infinitesimal amount of time it takes a laser pulse to travel to a surface and back. Millions of these individual measurements, once converted from the raw data, generate digital renderings accurate to within three millimetres. “The level of detail we achieve presents all sorts of applications,” says Kacyra. Besides revealing details invisible to the naked eye, the scans allow monitoring of cracks, erosion and water damage. Should any monument succumb to such threats, CyArk’s models can be used to help rebuild them exactly as they once were.
“The models are stunning to look at but they’re also a practical tool for archaeologists and conservators,” explains Kacyra, who visits as many projects as possible in his role as director of CyArk. “These digital blueprints are a far more accurate record of a building than anything done with manual measurements, so they will be absolutely critical to monitoring and, if the worst does happen, reconstruction.” To that end, CyArk and the World Monument Fund have compiled a vast database featuring almost 3,000 sites at risk from rising sea levels and earthquakes. Kacyra plans to digitise 500 monuments within the next five years.
Among those projects, one is close to Kacyra’s personal past. “We’re working hard to go to the ancient Assyrian ruins at Nineveh,” he says. “We already have some great photos on the website as well as excavation records that were contributed by archaeologists from [the University of California,] Berkeley. But I think that it is very important that we make three-dimensional scans too, especially with all of the political instability currently in Iraq. That would be a dream, to go back and scan the ruins that I remember visiting as a child.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
