The Mausoleum Architectural Project: Reinterpreting Palenque's temple of the inscriptions through 3D data-driven architectural analysis

The Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, Mexico, is an outstanding example of Classic Maya architecture erected in the seventh century as the funerary building for ruler K'inich Janab Pakal. For decades, scholars have speculated on its construction sequence and the potential existence of hidden rooms on either side of Pakal's mortuary chamber. This article aims to advance understanding of the Temple's architectural context in light of new 3D data. After reviewing the application of drone-based photogrammetry and terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging in the Maya area, we argue that these techniques are capable of enhancing the architectural analysis of the Temple of the Inscriptions and showing that this structure was part of a larger architectural project, encompassing the adjacent Temple XIII, and the connecting stepped building platform. Our findings demonstrate that the basal platforms for the Temple of the Inscriptions and Temple XIII were erected contemporaneously and that the design of their mortuary chambers follows a tripartite layout we identified in Palenque's elite funerary architecture and associated mortuary practices. We conclude that these three buildings were part of a mausoleum architectural project, the construction of which was initiated by Pakal to reshape Palenque's site-core and enshrine the ruling family's power and ancestors

Building Cultural Heritage Resilience through Remote Sensing: An Integrated Approach Using Multi-Temporal Site Monitoring, Datafication, and Web-GL Visualization

In the American West, wildfires and earthquakes are increasingly threatening the archaeological, historical, and tribal resources that define the collective identity and connection with the past for millions of Americans. The loss of said resources diminishes societal understanding of the role cultural heritage plays in shaping our present and future. This paper examines the viability of employing stationary and SLAM-based terrestrial laser scanning, close-range photogrammetry, automated surface change detection, GIS, and WebGL visualization techniques to enhance the preservation of cultural resources in California. Our datafication approach combines multi-temporal remote sensing monitoring of historic features with legacy data and collaborative visualization to document and evaluate how environmental threats affect built heritage. We tested our methodology in response to recent environmental threats from wildfire and earthquakes at Bodie, an iconic Gold Rush-era boom town located on the California and Nevada border. Our multi-scale results show that the proposed approach effectively integrates highly accurate 3D snapshots of Bodie’s historic buildings before/after disturbance, or post-restoration, with surface change detection and online collaborative visualization of 3D geospatial data to monitor and preserve important cultural resources at the site. This study concludes that the proposed workflow enhances the monitoring of at-risk California’s cultural heritage and makes a call to action to employ remote sensing as a pathway to advanced planning. View Full-Tex

Developing an interoperable cloud-based visualization workflow for 3D archaeological heritage data. The Palenque 3D Archaeological Atlas

In archaeology, 3D data has become ubiquitous, as researchers routinely capture high resolution photogrammetry and LiDAR models and engage in laborious 3D analysis and reconstruction projects at every scale: artifacts, buildings, and entire sites. The raw data and processed 3D models are rarely shared as their computational dependencies leave them unusable by other scholars. In this paper we outline a novel approach for cloud-based collaboration, visualization, analysis, contextualization, and archiving of multi-modal giga-resolution archaeological heritage 3D data. The Palenque 3D Archaeological Atlas builds on an open source WebGL systems that efficiently interlink, merge, present, and contextualize the Big Data collected at the ancient Maya city of Palenque, Mexico, allowing researchers and stakeholders to visualize, access, share, measure, compare, annotate, and repurpose massive complex archaeological datasets from their web-browsers

An Open Source Approach to Cultural Heritage: Nu.M.E. Project and the Virtual Reconstruction of Bologna

Nu.M.E. (New Electronic Museum of the city of Bologna) is a multidisciplinary project involving historiography, museum studies, and computer science. Since the late 1990’s it has been answering complex methodological questions with the aim to concentrate, on a single digital platform, the results of many years of research in the field of urban history. The case study of Nu.M.E. is the city of Bologna, in Italy, and its millenary tradition of urbanization. In its 2009 release, the project strives for the definition of new methodologies of cultural transmission for the general public. Nu.M.E. 2009 also adopts a new perspective based on cutting edge, open source technologies. Such choices make it possible to demonstrate that 3D graphics, real-time engines, and interactive storytelling can be useful tools for philological representations of ancient urban landscapes. At the same time, our research evidences that these technologies are fundamental resources for contemporary museology. This paper surveys the problems that emerge in analysis and communication of the medieval urban landscape of thirteenth-century Bologna and will present a new method of interpretation, and visualization of historical data