Wemyss Caves 4D: a digital future for the Pictish Wemyss Caves, Fife Scotland
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2018-12-24

Wemyss Caves 4D is a collaborative digital documentation and interpretation project involving archaeologists from the SCAPE Trust, University of St Andrews and the community group Save the Wemyss Ancient Caves Society (SWACS). The project website introduces a worldwide audience to renowned Pictish carvings inscribed into the walls of the Wemyss Caves in Fife, Scotland. Most of the caves are difficult to access and all are directly threatened by coastal erosion, structural instability and vandalism.

Laser scanning and convergence photogrammetric survey techniques were applied to eight hundred metres of coastline and eight caves to document the carvings within their setting. Individual carvings were recorded by community volunteers using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). 

The massive resulting dataset was simplified and combined with historic content to present a coherent interactive digital resource that allows users to explore a realistic virtual model of the caves; examine the carvings; access additional information, and even travel back in time to see the caves as the Picts would have done.

Within each cave, context-relevant material (image gallery, video, RTI scan etc.) can be called up via a popup viewer. These viewers are self-contained modules which integrate into the main code, allowing for more content types to be seamlessly added to the site via the application programming interface (API).

Achieving a responsive design for the website necessitated amending the WebRTI viewer developed by the Visual Computing Lab of the Italian National Research Council and further modifications to other third party components such as the panorama viewer to enable communication between them and the core code.

Content is also organised through a filterable catalogue allowing the considerable resources to be accessed through a single click. The back-end database allows us to easily add new or rediscovered content.

This presentation will discuss the design and technical challenges of the website, in which we sought to create a balance between the interactive interface designed to give some simulation of the experience of being in the caves with a practical and intuitive way of accessing the rich and detailed content relating to the caves and carvings. 

Mike Arrowsmith