Documenting Archaeological Tunnels within the Copan Acropolis, Part 2: Geospatial Data and Structural Modeling of Temple 16

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

At the Classic Maya city of Copán, Temple 16 is one of the most prominent structures; however, it is rapidly deteriorating along with other buried structures and archaeological tunnels. Inside Temple 16 are various structures and tombs including Rosalila, a uniquely preserved temple, as well as Oropendola, Clarinero, and Tortola, all of which cover earlier structures and royal burials. During various construction stages, the ancient Maya destroyed the vast majority of buildings to create foundations for new structures. Rosalila, however, was carefully encased with plaster for preservation before the final construction. Given the uniqueness and importance of this structure combined with the observed deterioration, the research team undertook a geospatial survey of Temple 16 to understand the structural loads for conservation and to characterize the deterioration with respect to recent intense rainstorms and hurricanes. This survey consisted of uncrewed aerial systems, global navigation satellite systems, and ground-based lidar scans encompassing the exterior and interior tunnel excavations yielding georeferenced 3D point clouds. The complexity of the excavations is captured at the centimeter-level for over 2 km of tunnels. This large dataset provides high-resolution and high-fidelity geometry for an accurate 3D structural modeling to understand and guide mitigation techniques for conservation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37048.0