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Modeling Machu Picchu

 

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 Images of scanning and products

The second half of the UCLA Cotsen field program finished up in Machu Picchu in collaboration with Instituto National de Cultura (INC), Mr. Fernando Astete, director of the National Archaeological Park of Machu Picchu and Vladimir Davilis, director of P.A.N. Machupicchu, director of Regional de Cultura Culsco. Machu Picchu is located on a ridge above the Urubamba Valley at about 8000 ft. The site of Machu Picchu were brought to international attention by the American Historian, Hiram Bingham in 1911. Because of its nearly inaccessible location Machu Picchu was not involved in the Spanish conquests around 1500 and so all structures are Incan, whereas Cuzco was involved in the Spanish conquests making it difficult to ascertain which is Incan, Spanish or reconstruction.

 

VUE recreation of Main Temple

3D recreation of the Main Temple depicting what it might have looked like when Hiram Bingham arrived in 1911 before cleanup.

 

Machu Picchu is an amazing tribute to beautiful masonry work, monumental terraces and ingenious architecture and this makes it a suitable site for laser scanning and photogrammetry. But because of its treacherous location it also poses many challenges in acquiring data. These challenges and its stunning architecture make it a perfect location for students to test the limits of technology in world heritage preservation.

 

Machu Picchu 2005 

 

Top-down, planimetric  view of 3D data produced from survey with the Optech laser scanner in 2005.

 

Students were provided with laser scan data that was acquired in 2005 by Angie Payne. (More information about the 2005 project can be found here.) They were tasked to fill in the "holes" of the data and complete higher resolution scans of 4 focus areas. These areas were the Temple of the Condor, the Main Temple, the Sun Temple and the Intiwantana.

To allow the students equal access to the laser scanner, GPS equipment and digital cameras the students were divided into 4 teams; Anti, Chinchay, Conti and Colla. Each team was able to spend multiple days and several evenings in Machu Picchu gathering data with each respective technology. During lab time, students processed data and were able to produce multiple products that they presented the last day.

 

Final presentation of the Temple of the Condor Scans

Aligned scans of the Temple of the Condor, the focus area for team Anti. 

 

All data collected will be publically available through this site's Data Download page and the InVirMet Data Repository.