Rush is on to save Syrian heritage
Various secretive efforts underway to stay ahead of Islamic State destruction
BEIRUT— Scientists are slipping 3D cameras to local activists and residents in Syria to scan antiquities. A U.S.-funded project aims to provide local conservators with resources to help safeguard relics. Inside Syria, volunteers are scrambling to document damage to monuments and confirm what remains.
The rush is on to find creative ways to protect Syria’s millennia-long cultural heritage in the face of the threat that much of it could be erased by the country’s war, now in its fifth year. Experts are desperate to stay a step ahead of the Islamic State group, which has ruthlessly destroyed and looted sites as it spreads across Syria and Iraq.
The efforts are tempered by a recognition of the realities — that in some cases the best that can be hoped for is that ancient monuments can be documented in as great detail as possible so that if they are destroyed they can still be studied in the future, or possibly accurate replicas could one day be built. All acknowledge that nothing short of a military or political solution can stop the danger posed by the militants and the conflict.
The campaigns are fraught with risks. Getting supplies to activists on the ground can expose them to retribution from militants or others suspicious of outside powers. As a result, the various efforts underway are mostly cloaked in secrecy, with their organizers reluctant to give specifics on their activities for fear of endangering those on the ground.
But among experts, there’s a feeling that something — anything — must be done.
“I don’t want to be having this conversation with somebody three years down the road, and they say, ‘Gee why didn’t you start in 2015 when they (Islamic State) only controlled 3 per cent of the sites?’ ” said Roger Michel, whose Million Image Database, an Oxford Institute of Digital Archaeology project, began distributing hundreds of 3D cameras around the region to activists.
The Islamic State group’s advances mean antiquities in Syria and Iraq face the danger not just of damage but of intentional eradication. The most stunning example came in the past month, when the militants blew up two famed temples in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. Satellite images showed that the two temples, which had survived for nearly 2,000 years, were reduced to rubble.
The Million Image Database project, which is backed by UNESCO, aims to “flood the region” with lowcost 3D cameras, delivered to activists to document antiquities in their area, Michel said. The point-and-shoot cameras, which cost about $50 each, take a stereoscopic image of the relics, with a granularity of detail measured in centimetres.
“The idea is to have as many images made of as many objects and build- ings as possible in advance of the destruction by the IS forces,” Michel said. Nearly 1,000 cameras have already been deployed or are on their way, not only to Syria, but also Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, Jordan and Egypt. The aim is to distribute 5,000 cameras regionwide by next year, at a total cost of $7 million.
The camera user can then upload the pictures or videos to the project’s website. The website is closed to the public to protect the activists’ anonymity and to ensure the site remains a purely scholarly venture, not a social media platform for activists, said Alexy Karenowska, a physicist who developed the web interface and is the project’s technology director. As the project progresses, it will find a way to share storytelling from the material to the public, she said.
The project has linked up with a leading Chinese 3D concrete printing company to consider eventually reconstructing some of the architecture that has been destroyed.
A separate project would carry out far more detailed scans of antiquities in Syria and Iraq using laser scanners. The scanners bounce lasers off the surface of objects in the field, measuring millions of points a second to create a data set known as a point cloud. The data can be used to create 3D images accurate to two or three millimetres to create models or virtual tours of the sites or allow full-scale reconstructions.
But while the scanning brings the highest precision, it also requires experts, accompanied by security teams, to visit the sites to scan them over extended periods using precise equipment — a much more unwieldy footprint in potentially dangerous areas than the 3D cameras.
The project, called “Anqa,” the Arabic word for the phoenix, aims to laser-scan 200 objects in Syria, Iraq and other parts of the region, said its director Ben Kacyra, of the California-based scanning company CyArk. It will work with the government antiquities departments in Syria and Iraq, as well as UNESCO, to deploy teams in northern and southern Iraq, Damascus and other areas, Kacyra said.
“We have a story to tell there that we can’t lose for our children and grandchildren,” Kacyra said. “Our heritage is much more than our collective memory. It is our collective treasure.”
Another campaign is taking a more low-tech approach, aiming at directly protecting at least some sites. The project, by the American Schools of Oriental Research, provides supplies and funding to local experts and volunteers for things such as crates to store artifacts or sandbags to pack around unmovable structures to give some protection against shelling or bombs, said LeeAnn Gordon, project manager for Conservation and Heritage Preservation at ASOR, which receives U.S. State Department funding.
“What we are really looking for is these kinds of small projects that can have big impact,” Gordon said. “Syria has so much. In my opinion, there is still more intact than there is destroyed.”