In the meantime, the British Museum in cooperation with Google Arts & Culture embarked upon an exciting project to preserve and even bring back some of this cultural heritage to the Maya and the rest of the world. Pablo Sanchez, a biologist from the Centre of Atmospheric Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, “We could lose all of the inscriptions and writing on the stelae and columns within 100 years.” Cultural heritage specialists have been searching for solutions, so far without success. A cultural heritage beyond price for millions of modern Maya, and the entire world, yet every year more and more of these glyphs are becoming unreadable due to the ravages of acid rain, sweeping in from hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
These glyphs tell stories of births, deaths, marriages, wars, conquests, and more. Only in recent decades have a handful of scholars reached the point where they can understand 90% of what the Maya went to such great lengths to carve into stone, wood, bone, jade, and shell. But hundreds of miles away lay abandoned Maya cities teeming with pyramids, monuments, and other architecture engraved with Maya writing, also known as glyphs.
Only four Maya books survived his fiery wrath. When 16 th century Spanish Bishop Diego de Landa ordered his men across the Yucatan to burn every Maya book and image they could find, calling them “lies of the devil,” in the hours that followed, centuries of Maya philosophy and cultural expression were lost forever. Their ambitious goal – f or a 2-person team to be able to 3D scan hundreds of medium and large casts of Maya monuments in a crowded warehouse, and transform those scans into lifelike 3D models for cultural heritage, research, and educational uses. The British Museum needed a faster, more flexible method than traditional photogrammetry to digitally capture more than 400 ancient Maya casts for the Google Maya Project, and so they chose Artec Eva, a high-resolution color 3D scanner.