A virtual connection between past and present: The digital revival of Cham's Architecture (Vietnam)

Abstract

The traditional approach for understanding an archaeological site, mainly focused on excavations and stratigraphic examination of findings through the archaeological analysis, is still the main way for hypothesizing its most probable interpretation. As demonstrated in several case studies 3D digital acquisition techniques may greatly help for applications such as site and findings documentation, digital stratigraphy, 3D GIS or virtual interaction between experts. In addition, an accurate geometrical representation in digital form may be used, once integrated by archaeological considerations, as a starting point for creating virtual reconstructions of the site, embedding the most probable hypotheses. However, this last step might be critical for a apparently trivial reason: with very few exceptions the archaeological skill for interpreting some ruins and the technological skill for 3D modeling the corresponding site reconstruction are owned by different individuals or group of scholars. The aim of this paper is to describe a widespread 3D documentation of a site and a possible reconstruction process step by step, starting from a laser scan survey and a set of historical documents, focusing on a reasonable multi-disciplinary concurrent interaction to reach the best virtual reconstruction solutions. This path may help both archaeologists to better focus their thoughts through a detailed visual representation, and the technological experts to avoid misleading details in the final virtual reconstruction. The case study regards a group of Cham temples located in the My Son site, an UNESCO archeological area in Vietnam.