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Photogrammetry at Tiwanaku

 

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Adam Barnes prepares for HDS at Tiwanaku.

Considering the archaeological importance of Tiwanaku and the amount of research devoted to it, one is surprised to find that the most detailed and accurate existing spatial data for the Bolivian Altiplano, prior to this project, was made nearly one century ago. In order to produce up-to-date topographic and plainimetric data for Tiwanaku's core area, photogrammetric processing was done on a total of twelve historic vertical aerial photographs originally collected by the Bolivian military in 1972 and 1992. Becuase very little was know about the aerial photographs, this would be considered a type of forecsic photogrammetry, where any available information is searched for clues and assumptions are tested. 

The spatial data produced from this work included topographic models and orthorectified photos, both of which have been assimilated with other data collected for Tiwanaku into a site-wide three-dimensional model. This model includes a terrestrial LiDAR high density survey (HDS) of Tiwanaku collected via 3D laser scanning, geophysical data collected using a variety of geophysical instruments, and total station survey data.

Data from the various surveys conducted at Tiwanaku is available in the InVirMet Data Repository under Tiwanaku 3D data.  For more information on the project, including publications and information on the different surveys conducted at Tiwanaku by CAST,  please visit the Tiwanaku Project pages.

 

This work was supported, in part, by an NSF grant:

Grant IIS-0431070 Computing and Retrieving 3D Archaeological Structures from Subsurface Surveying.

Color anaglyph image of the Tiwanaku core (red/blue anaglyph glasses required for stereo viewing)

Red/blue anaglyph image of the Tiwanaku core