Wired Science

Saving Historical Sites, Virtually

Though they may be centuries old, the world’s archeological treasures – from the Pyramids to remnants of Native American villages – won’t be around forever. Rain, wind, burrowing rodents and touchy-feely tourists are constantly eroding many of them.  Not to mention that some are simply destroyed by people, like Afghanistan's famous Buddhas of Bamiyan that the Taliban blew up.

CyArk, a non-profit organization, aims to do something about that. The five-year-old outfit uses laser scanners to record three dimensional digital images of major heritage sites, from Roman ruins in Germany to ancient temples in Cambodia.

The scanners send out a laser beam, and measure the amount of time it takes to hit the object and bounce back. Using that data, it records the coordinates of that point; do that a few million times and you get a “point cloud”, which can then be mapped into a 3D model of the subject. CyArk makes those scans available through its website. That gives armchair archeologists the chance to explore these places to their heart’s content, without adding to the traffic trampling through them.

Join Ziya Tong for a trek with one of CyArk’s founders to Mesa Verde National Park, 52,000 acres of rugged desert beauty sitting 7,000 feet above sea level. Their target: mud, clay and adobe homes built right into the natural bowls of the valley’s walls, the homes of a long disappeared people that have stood for 800 years but are now threatened by erosion. And check out the article History is Crumbling for more on one of CyArk’s most ambitious projects: archiving archaeological records of the ancient city of Nineveh in today's war-torn Iraq.