Principle Investigator – Nicola Lercari
Specialist Consultant – Gesualdo Busacca
CGI models – Grant Cox (ArtasMedia)
Unity App Creation – Jad Aboulhosn
Funding – University of California Office of the President’s Research Catalyst Award for “At-Risk Cultural Heritage and the Digital Humanities”
Programs used – 3DS Max/Vray/After Effects/Photoshop/Unity
A recent article about this project can be found here (available for download for three months [18/06/2020]
Online Collection can be found here
The ‘Shrine’ 10 sequence is made of four superimposed buildings – or five, depending on whether ‘Shrines’ VI.A.10 and VI.B.10 are considered two separate buildings or two phases of the same one. It was uncovered at Çatalhöyük between Mellaart’s excavation in the 1960s and more recent archaeological work conducted in the framework of the Çatalhöyük Research Project, under the direction of Ian Hodder. With its multiple rebuilds, the sequence covers a significant part of the entire site’s sequence, spanning from the later part of its early period (c. 7100-6700 BC) to its entire middle period (c. 6700-6500 BC), with an estimated time range of about 300 years. Houses that are rebuilt multiple times also tend to be more elaborated (both architecturally and symbolically) and to contain multiple burials. In particular, the link between burials and multiple rebuilds is crucial, as it signals the extended time depth of a household both through ancestral connection – i.e. the physical presence of human remains buried below the house’s floors – and by the physical endurance of the house itself. For this reason, buildings that comprise multiple rebuilds, architectural and symbolic elaboration, and multiple burials have been termed ‘history houses’ by Hodder and Pels (2010), and are interpreted as houses that achieved an important social and symbolic status within the wider community, although this socio-symbolic importance does not seem to correlate with greater wealth or preferential access to resources.
Taken from – https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/collection/bb3485072m
Following on from successful work at the site of Çatalhöyük since 2010, we were tasked with reconstructing a sequence in the life cycle of ‘Shrine’ 10 from the Neolithic site. In 2017 following a visit to the site work began on an archive inside of 3DS Max to build these spaces, they were then rendered out to create high quality shots and taken into Unity to provide an online interactive resource, which can be found here.
To find more out about some of our work at the site, go to our projects pages.