Project at a glance
- Client: Government of Gibraltar,
- Sector: Heritage, archaeological survey and visualisation
- Platform: 3D laser survey data, rendered visualisations, and a real-time environment test in Unreal Engine 4
- Services: Large-scale 3D laser scanning survey, HD photography, orthographic and plan drawing production, photorealistic visualisation, real-time engine feasibility work
The brief
In November 2013 the Government of Gibraltar commissioned a 3D survey of the Gorham’s Cave Complex, the sea caves on the eastern face of the Rock that hold some of the latest known evidence of Neanderthal occupation in Europe.
It became the largest single heritage survey in our archive.
The date is the part worth holding onto. Gorham’s Cave Complex was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016. Our survey pre-dates the inscription by nearly three years. We recorded the site before the world formally recognised what it was.
The challenge
Caves are among the least cooperative subjects a survey team can be given. There is no natural light. There is no exterior vantage point from which the whole form can be seen. The geometry is continuous, irregular and self-occluding, so every surface hides another one, and a scan position that captures one chamber wall will be blind to the recess three metres behind it.
Gorham’s adds its own difficulties. The complex is a set of linked sea caves reached from the water at the foot of a cliff, with an archaeological deposit that is itself the reason for the site’s significance and cannot be treated as floor to walk on carelessly.
Then there is the reason for recording it at all. An excavated archaeological cave changes. Deposits are removed as work proceeds, and the removal is the research. A survey captures a state of the site that is, by the nature of the discipline, temporary.
What we built
The core deliverable was the survey: a complete 3D laser scan record of the cave complex, captured across a campaign that made it the largest heritage survey we had undertaken.
From that data we produced a full visualisation set. A series of photorealistic renders of the cave complex, a set of Vanguard Cave renders covering the adjoining chamber, and orthographic and plan drawings derived from the survey geometry. Those drawings are the workaday output that archaeologists and conservators actually use, and they are only obtainable from a measured record.
The outcome
A complete 3D laser survey of the Gorham’s Cave Complex, captured in 2013, three years before UNESCO inscribed the site as a World Heritage Site, supported by a photorealistic visualisation set, orthographic and plan drawings, a documented case study, a later HD photography campaign and a further scanning engagement in 2018.
What the survey made possible is a measured record of a Neanderthal cave complex in the state it was in before its inscription, and before further excavation altered it. That is the durable output. It exists whether or not anybody ever builds an application from it.
The visualisation work made possible something narrower but not trivial. It showed, in 2014, that survey data from a cave could be taken into a games engine and rendered as a real-time interior. That was three years before we did the same thing for Historic England at Stonehenge, and it is the point in our archive where the heritage survey business and the immersive one first meet.
We recorded Gorham’s Cave in 2013. UNESCO inscribed it in 2016. The survey pre-dates the world’s formal recognition of the site by three years.” Luminous XR
