Why CHI Exists
General Considerations | Need | Advantages | First Steps

Need
Impediments to Scholarship and Public Education
Obstacles to Ongoing Cultural Identity | Imperilment of the Past

The need for CHI's work is acute and global in scope. There is an urgent need to preserve our cultural legacy from an unprecedented and rising tide of looting and destruction. Given the limitations of traditional documentary methods, those who wish to carefully examine cultural material and sites are forced to travel to the location of the collection or site and secure often tightly restricted access authorization. This travel is costly, time consuming, and a serious impediment to the pursuit of scholarship, the education of the interested public, and the efforts by communities of people with shared cultural identities who desire to learn from and care for their collective past.

Impediments to Scholarship and Public Education

Over time, much of humanity’s cultural heritage material has been dispersed into numerous collections often far removed from its place of origin. This permits people in many parts of the world to see representative examples of human culture from distant lands, but can make comprehensive study prohibitively difficult, time consuming, and costly. For example, sculpture from the Parthenon exists in dozens of collections. Sometimes the problem is reversed with scholarly expertise scattered around the world, unable to bring their collective efforts to bear on a single project. For example, there are only a small number of people in the world who can fluently read ancient cuneiform tablets. Over 120,000 cuneiform tablets have been in the British Museum for over 100 years. Only about 15% have been read. Clearly, virtual representation of this collection would speed their decipherment, while simultaneously protecting the originals from damage.

Institutions offering public display of cultural heritage material rarely show more than a tiny fraction of the objects in their possession at any one time. Frequently, material is too fragile, small, insufficiently ‘popular’, or known only to a few specialists to ever reach public display. Many of the worlds archives and sites are in extremely remote locations and often lack display facilities. Access to non-displayed objects and closed sites is often highly restricted, available only to those with the ’proper credentials’. Where it is possible for interested members of the public to gain access, the process of obtaining that permission is frequently laborious and difficult.

Without digital representations, much of humanity's legacy will remain locked away, isolated in disparate collections and stored in institutional basements.


Obstacles to Ongoing Cultural Identity

Many living cultures are threatened with assimilation by more populous and economically dominant societies. Retaining their historical identity is a key element in avoiding the catastrophic consequences of cultural collapse. The scattering of cultural heritage resources is a serious obstacle to the efforts by communities of people with shared cultural identities who desire to learn from and care for their collective past. This is particularly onerous for members of indigenous cultural communities whose treasures are spread across the face of the globe, making them inaccessible to the heirs of the cultures from which they came.

A Tlingit Native American living in Alaska who wants to explore his or her cultural legacy is essentially out of luck. Most of their patrimony has either been destroyed or dispersed around the globe. It resides in the museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in St. Petersberg Russia, Switzerland, Germany, France, England, New York, Washington DC and a host of other locations. To most Tlingits, this material might as well be on the dark side of the moon.

Innovations in the use of virtual representations offer people the potential for rich cultural experience without requiring the materials direct physical presence. This experience can mitigate the disadvantages of physical separation from cultural material for both the cultural community and potential repatriating institutions. Imagine the youth of cultures under pressure around the world mouse clicking their way along a path to see, for the first time, the wisdom of their elders.


Imperilment of the Past

The enormous financial reward from smuggling plundered cultural heritage material is driving the wholesale liquidation of humanity’s history. This destruction is not limited to museums and sites in war-torn, politically corrupt, or underdeveloped regions, but occurs in under protected contexts in every county of the world. A principle reason that this dark trade thrives is that ‘legally’ obtained cultural materials are essentially indistinguishable from their plundered counterparts. A mesopotamian cuneiform tablet ‘collected’ in the 1800s looks the same as a mesopotamian cuneiform tablet looted from Iraq in the 2000s. The only way to tell the difference is with documentation that uniquely identifies the object and is tied to its history or ‘provenance’. With the exception of a tiny fraction of widely published cultural material, this documentation, if it exists at all, exists in a limited and fragile physical form, known only to a small number of people. Yesterday’s documentary practices cannot stem the destruction.

High quality digital documentation effectively ‘fingerprints’ cultural materials. If a digitally documented object is stolen, the digital ‘fingerprints’ of the missing material are easily circulated among law enforcement, antiquities dealers, and the collecting community. This renders it much less attractive to the thieves who wish to steal our collective history and their potential buyers in the illicit antiquities trade.

A significant portion of looted material is excavated illegally from sites secretly discovered by the thieves and unknown to the scientific community. In this case, digital ’finger printing’ does not provide a direct solution because it is possible to document only what we know. However, as more and more publicly and privately held cultural material is adequately imaged and provenanced, the more suspicious undocumented items will appear. This increased attention raises the risk and serves as a deterrent to resellers. In an ideal world, all antiquities would require identifying digital records as a prerequisite of sale.

Widespread digital documentation offers a potent response to the unprecedented looting of cultural treasures occurring today.