Reconstructing the Past at Chichén Itzá
The product of more than four years of work, this repository builds on data collected during the making of the film Tales of the Maya Skies, a full-dome planetarium production that tells the story of ancient Maya cosmology. The film was led by ArtsLAB director David Beining and Alex Hall, then at the Chabot Space and Science Center.
Our subsequent open data archive contains photography along with 3D models of objects and structures at the Maya site Chichén Itzá, complemented by articles and videos that describe how to work with the data using open source software.
INSIGHT led the 3D scan documentation completed, both for the site itself and many of its most important museum objects now distributed throughout Mexico. Funded by the National Science Foundation and Instituto Politécnico Nacional, the interdisciplinary project led to research findings in the fields of archaeology, art history and computer vision.
Beyond site documentation, the project has yielded views of what this Maya polity make have looked like in the late Postclassic period; several renderings are shown at right.
On-site digital scanning at Chichen Itza was provided by INSIGHT and CyArk, a non-profit group and INSIGHT partner based in Oakland, California. Both the documentation and reconstruction work was included in Chabot Space and Science Center’s full dome film Tales of the Maya Skies, now playing in planetarium-style ‘full dome’ theaters around the world.
