Curious Travellers: Repurposing imagery to manage and interpret threatened monuments, sites and landscapes

YesThe AHRC-funded Curious Travellers project (www.visualisingheritage.org) is a data-mining and crowd sourced infrastructure to help record, manage and interpret archaeological sites, monuments and heritage at risk. It provides a priority response to the globally important challenge of sites that have been destroyed or are under immediate threat from natural disasters, neglect, conflict and cultural vandalism. The project uses two workflows to scrape web-based imagery and crowd-source imagery to recreate 3D models of sites and monuments at risk. Many threats to heritage are linked to issues of access – impacting conservation and site management as well as the safety of individuals. The project offers sustainable solutions – working with extant imagery that does not place individuals at additional safety risk, whilst helping to contextualise visible archaeology by linking to relevant site and landscape data and integrating this into local historic environment record frameworks that make this data freely accessible to all

Irrigation on the Tehran Plain, Iran: Tepe Pardis - the site of a possible Neolithic irrigation feature?

This paper presents direct evidence in the form of a triangular cross-section channel (1 m in width and 0.24 m in depth), for Late Neolithic artificial water management on the Tehran Plain, which may represent the earliest example of artificial water management in Iran. The antiquity of this channel is supported by dating directly above and below by C14, associated ceramic sherds and correlation with Late Neolithic levels. The nature and function of this channel is evaluated through comparisons with natural channels (ancient and modern) together with evidence from palynology and sedimentology. It is here interpreted as a silted-up artificial canal with infill-deposits that indicate periods of shallow relatively quiet flow, periods of drying-out and occasional episodes of greater flow. This study strongly suggests that 6th millennium farmers at Tepe Pardis in Iran were irrigating their crops, and complements the evidence from Choga Mami in Iraq concerning early irrigation systems

Curious Travellers: Using web-scraped and crowd-sourced imagery in support of heritage under threat

YesDesigned as a pragmatic approach that anticipates change to cultural heritage, this chapter discusses responses that encompass records for tangible cultural heritage (monuments, sites and landscapes) and the narratives that see the impact upon them. The Curious Travellers project provides a mechanism for digitally documenting heritage sites that have been destroyed or are under immediate threat from unsympathetic development, neglect, natural disasters, conflict and cultural vandalism. The project created and tested data-mining and crowd-sourced workflows that enable the accurate digital documentation and 3D visualisation of buildings, archaeological sites, monuments and heritage at risk. When combined with donated content, image data are used to recreate 3D models of endangered and lost monuments and heritage sites using a combination of open-source and proprietary methods. These models are queried against contextual information, helping to place and interrogate structures with relevant site and landscape data for the surrounding environment. Geospatial records such as aerial imagery and 3D mobile mapping laser scan data serve as a framework for adding new content and testing accuracy. In preserving time-event records, image metadata offers important information on visitor habits and conservation pressures, which can be used to inform measures for site management.The Curious Travellers project was funded as a component of the AHRC Digital Transformations Theme Large Grant ‘Fragmented Heritage’ (AH/L00688X/1). AHRC Follow-on funding has seen this approach contribute to the BReaTHe project (AH/S005951/1) which seeks to Build Resilience Through Heritage for displaced communities and with a contribution to the BA Cities and Infrastructures Scheme project, ‘Reducing Disaster Risk to Life and Livelihoods by evaluating the seismic performance of retrofitted interventions within Kathmandu’s UNESCO World Heritage Site during the 2015 Earthquake’, with Durham University (KF1\100109).The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 06 Apr 2024