Documenting Merv

CyArk completed a comprehensive digital documentation campaign at Merv in 2007 in conjunction with excavations in the grand bazaar undertaken by the University College London, the results of which are now available up on their website. This is Kind of a Big Deal for historians of Islamic architecture. CyArk’s work is a model for digital documentation projects: content includes spherical panoramas, point clouds from laser scans, architectural drawings, and GIS data associated with each digital artifact. In a perfect world, every architectural archaeological site would receive such comprehensive documentation before and after archaeological interventions or conservation.