"Inside the Castillo at Chichen Itza"
with Dominique Rissolo, University of California, San Diego
University of California researchers Dominique Rissolo, Scott McAvoy, and Travis Stanton are working with their INAH colleagues, Jose Osorio and Francisco Perez, to create an online digital atlas of Chichen Itza. Together, they are using a range of 3D technologies – including LiDAR, photogrammetry, and structured-light scanning – to capture building facades, sculptures, and monuments in unprecedented detail. A component of the scanning campaign is to document interior spaces, from temple and palace rooms to the cave beneath the Osario. Central to this effort was a multimodal and multiscalar recording of the excavation tunnels and temple inside the Castillo. The results offer new views into one of the most celebrated structures in the Maya world.
Dominique Rissolo is an associate research scientist with the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego where he co-leads the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI). He is also a codirector of the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. As an archaeologist, Dominique’s interdisciplinary research focuses ancient Maya and Paleoamerican cave and cenote use as well as Pre-Columbian coastal human ecology on the Yucatan Peninsula. Dominique and his colleagues at UC San Diego, UC Riverside, and INAH are conducting a multiyear scanning project at Chichen Itza which will result in a comprehensive, online, interactive, digital atlas of the monuments and structures of Chichen. Rissolo has been actively involved in the development of digital workflows for the visualization of 3D data from submerged and terrestrial sites and has enabled collaborating researchers to expand their technical capabilities. Dominique also co-directs the Costa Escondida and Hoyo Negro projects.
