Joop de Jong Expert Assessor of the European Heritage Award 2020 Winning Project Scanning for Syria
The pilot project “Scanning for Syria” was initiated to support rescue and preservation efforts of their archaeological heritage. The European Heritage Awards website describes the project as follows: “Assyrian clay tablets (dating from circa 1200 BC) from the site of Tell Sabi Abyad in northern Syria were excavated by archaeologists from Leiden University in the 1990s and were lost during the war. At the time, the archaeologists used silicon moulds to record the information the original tablets contained. Innovations in digital imaging technology and computational analysis allowed for the development of new algorithms, which automatically and accurately generate digital reconstructions of the original clay tablets from the scanned 3D raw data of the silicon moulds. (…) Leiden University and the Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) in partnership with the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and Heidelberg University (Germany) carried out this collaborative work.” (Source: http://www.europeanheritageawards.eu/winners/scanning-for-syria/)
The Jury praised the interdisciplinary nature of the project as well as the fact that the method is replicable and can be applied to other, small size objects. The jury added: “It is also notable that Syrian archaeologists with refugee status in the Netherlands were actively included in the project, attesting to its positive social impact.”