LEARNING SITES, INC.

This project will document and publish a uniquely comprehensive report on the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king, Ashur-nasir-pal II (883-859 BCE), preserved at his capital city of Kalhu (ancient Nimrud, today in northeastern Iraq).  We will bring together for the first time all new, updated, and extant materials and research about the Palace, using leading-edge computer-graphics technologies (including virtual reality), to create a multimedia, interactive, educational and scholarly resource with applications for colleges, universities, independent scholars, and museums.  The published results (on DVD and the Internet) will evoke the visual grandeur of this once important building complex, the paradigm for all later Assyrian palaces.

Learning Sites is working under the guidance of Samuel M. Paley, Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo, Richard P. Sobolewski, R.A., Warsaw, Poland, and Alison B. Snyder, R.A., University of Oregon.

There has been widespread interest in publishing and otherwise displaying preliminary visual and descriptive information from this project,  including:

For 1999.  A prototype version was specifically requested to be shown at: the ArcheoVirtua multimedia and archaeology conference, Bourgogne, France (March), and the MediArTech99, in Florence, Italy (March). The conferences will showcase the latest technologies for visualizing archaeological sites.

1998. B.J. Novitski. Rendering Real and Imagined Buildings, Rockport Publishers: Gloucester, MA, 1998 (description of the project and a rendering from the model).

April 1998. Diana Phillips Mahoney. "Time Travels," Computer Graphics World, vol. 21.4:81-82 (an article focusing on the project, including several images).

March 1998.  At the Computer Applications in Archaeology annual conference (Barcelona, Spain), a computer-generated flythrough of the palace was included in a comprehensive video on the use of virtual reality in archaeology.  Images and a description of the project were also included in a paper and demonstration presented at the conference by Donald H. Sanders.

October 1997 and September 1998. HiTechMarketing (a public relations firm) requested several renderings from the model to be included in forthcoming articles in CAD Systems, Multi-CADD, and THE Journal magazines.

July 1997. France2 TV requested (for a program on virtual archaeology) a short flythrough of the 3D model of the Palace's northern courtyard ending at Entry D.

March 1997.  Discussions of the project at the Computer Applications in Archaeology annual conference, Birmingham, England.  Donald H. Sanders, "Virtual Worlds for Archaeological Research and Education," in  Lucie Dingwall, Editor. Proceedings of the Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference for 1997, Computer Applications in Archaeology Society, Publications Committee (in press for 1999).