El Qitar

This is where much of it began. El Qitar is a late Bronze Age fortified city on the banks of the Euphrates in Syria. It is now a dam abutment, but previously it had been excavated in the 1980s for a number of years by teams from The University of Melbourne.

This site was mapped using 3 hair stadia originally, augmented with EDM tachaeometry as the years progressed. A rock-by-rock plan of the exposed wall elements was also created using aerial photographs taken from a kite.

The project also coincided with the arrival of the Intergraph CAED system in the Faculty of Engineering. The 3d site data was modelled in the INtergrapd IDGS cad package, and some of the first computer based reconstructions of an archaeological site were produced!