Details are still emerging of the scale of destruction on the heritage site of Palmyra in Syria. Now work is beginning by archaeologists at Oxford and Harvard, determined to create a digital record of the ancient sites that remain. They are planning to get thousands of 3D cameras into Syria and Iraq that can be used by people on the ground to take 3D images of the countries’ cultural heritage.
This work is part of a growing trend to create heritage archives that can be used to support young people learning about world cultures. Online photo banks of heritage artefacts are growing. In the UK, there are quite a few heritage–based visual resources that can be used in the classroom, such as The British Museum’s project “teaching history with 100 objects” and the Wessex Archaeology collection.
Recently, special attention has been placed on 3D heritage visualisations, especially in the emerging area of 3D printing for education. The start-up project Museofabber aims to 3D-print museum collections and use them in the classrooms, inviting teachers to send in requests for objects to be printed. Other 3D printing initiatives include 3D miniatures made by the Virtual Curation Laboratory and 3D printed bones at the University of Western Florida.
Alongside 2D visual artefact collections and 3D printing, educational 3D games have also incorporated heritage artefacts, such as the Danish company Serious Games Interactive’s game for Danish school children featuring Viking heritage and artefacts in the city of Odense.
Using Heritage to Forge Connections
Yet a question remains around the extent to which these educational projects can help connect children of different nations. In order to care for and understand heritage, we need to start with understanding and caring for people around the globe. The idea of using heritage in education to act as “connective tissues” among children and people around the world is especially important for nations that do not belong to the same geographical or cultural realm (for example, East and West). It’s also very pertinent for regions and nations that have experienced a history of conflict, or where heritage may have been destroyed.
Such inter-cultural exchange can challenge particular discourses about heritage, such as those that foster a single, nationalistic interpretation of history, national identity and artefacts or those that include negative images of other people and cultures as a whole. The scholar Amartya Sen argues that a singular, pure identity of any kind is an illusion, connected to many conflicts and barbarities in the world.
