Arriving in Khartoum, the Zamani team, led by Prof. Heinz Ruther and including Christoph Held, Roshan Bhurtha, Ralph Schroeder and I, collected our luggage and found our way to the Customs Offices. We were expecting problems clearing the equipment, which included two Laser Scanners and a RTK GPS unit, since bureaucracy in African countries is often a nightmare. Customs proved to be near mission impossible and was actually so unbelievably irrational it was comical, being thrown out of the customs offices and sneaking back in through a back door to find our equipment at the top of high piles of boxes. It really was a mammoth task to get into the country, organise transport, accommodation, food and generators, but fortunately we had the help of the Humbolt University in Berlin who have established an archeological camp at the site and put us up. With their influence we managed to obtain visas and permissions and arrange all other logistics. We would like to sincerely thank Dr. Sulah, Claudia Naessar, Cornelia Kleinitz, Thomas Scheibner and Tim Karberg, without whom this project would not have been possible.
We managed to leave Khartoum just as it was getting dark and, after three h
ours along the high-way that runs north from Khartoum along the Nile, we turned off into the open desert and drove for another hour until we reached Musawwarat late on Sunday evening. Our new home was to be the Humbolt archeological camp; a fully self-sufficient abode with solar power, kitchen, toilets, showers, and eating areas which has been running for over 15 years. All of us were grateful to have such a charming camp and relaxing crew to work with.
The Musawwarat es-Sufra temple is a collection of ruined walls and passages. Pillars stand at irregular heights and crude and complex carvings mark the walls. There are four main temple areas all interconnected by passages and ramps. Some think this temple could have been used for elephant training, others think it was a school for architects - its true function is not precisely known. It was built during the height of Kushite power around 100BC when the Kushites adopted much Egyptian mythology. Now the temple lies abandoned, loose rocks spilling from holes in the walls. The exposed regions lie unguarded from the wind and the sand and wind erosion is evident on many columns and blocks. This is why it is essential that scanning projects like ours act quickly to digitally preserve these monuments before they are gone forever.
After a short reconnaissance tour of the site the work begun. The scanning was planned to optimise the two 3D laser scanners we had brought along on the trip; a Leica HDS 3000 and HDS 6000. The 3000 has a range of approximately 130 m and so we used this scanner to capture the full extent of the site, which is around 250m x 200m. These scans will be used for registration as they tie the whole site together. The problem is this scanner needs to run off mains power, since we do not have a battery with us, and this caused a lot of problems. The generators at the camp were found to be temperamental and we really battled getting them to run consistently.
The Leica HDS 6000 which we had a battery for is much faster but has a shorter range of approximately 50m. We therefore used the 6000 to focus on capturing details, including the tops of walls. These walls are crumbling apart and sometimes two or three meters high and it was quite tricky setting up the scanner in certain sections while being careful not to damage the temple. Chris’s rock climbing skills were put to the test as he chose what some would call risky setups, which were no doubt perfectly stable in his mind, but would have scared the heck out of our insurance company.
Our procedure of scanning was not to use targets, as is the conventional approach. We find that the setting up of targets uses considerable time, especially since we have so many scans. We used geometric surface features of the structure for registration of the meshed scans. We were also capturing the scan positions with RTK GPS and orientating the scanner in a constant direction to assist registration.
The sequence of the day was as follows: get up before sunrise, eat a breakfast consisting of pita bread, yoghurt, goats’ cheese and tea before heading to the site and beginning work while it was still cool. The 3000 would be set up for a long scan, around 3 hours, and the team would then go about scanning with the 6000, taking HDR panoramas, photogrammetric images and doing RTK GPS of the site and surrounds. We would work until about 13h00 when the sun was really strong and then return to camp to rest and eat a lunch before heading out for an afternoon session until the sun descended. Often this would mean a 12 hour work day, but the time passed quickly and the work was fun.
The evenings were spent downloading data, recharging batteries and preparing supper. Besides being so isolated we ate very well and had amazing braais of lamb and vegetables, and one night Roshan cooked a tuna curry. 
Our bedroom is under the clear night stars with an incredibly bright full moon, sleeping on camp stretchers out in the open desert. A dog’s howling would top off the wilderness atmosphere, but Roshan’s snoring is just as unearthly. We are truly in no man’s land out here and it is quite satisfying being totally away from any other human contact, in the middle of the Sudan, at this spectacular heritage site.
The scanning ran smoothly for most of the fieldwork. The major problems we had were from a massive sandstorm which arrived on the second day of scanning and forced us to abandon scanning for an afternoon and the following morning. The sand and dust could easily have gotten into the scanners and wrecked havoc. The wind stayed strong all night and we had to run after our bedding a few times. The other problem was power, or rather the lack of it. Towards the end of the fieldwork we had managed to put both generators out of commission and since we also wanted to scan the Hafier, an ancient water reservoir, and the Lion temple, which are both situated nearby Musawwarat we had a major problem. Eventually we were scanning with the 3000 from the car battery, hooked up to an inverter while the car idled, but even this gave up the ghost. Luckily we had solar power and could charge the 6000 batteries and the GPS.
We took a lot of RTK GPS measurements on the site to georeference a map of Musawwarat done by an architect in the 1970’s as well as to level and position the final 3D model. We also took GPS measurements of the outside of the gravel dumps of the Hafier to calculate the volume of earth removed to create the Hafier and thus the volume of water it once held.
After the scanning of Musawwarat was completed we took a trip to visit Naga, a nearby Meroic. There a team with a white light scanner was scanning the pillars of the temple in sub-millimeter accuracy. It was an awesome day trip during which we also got to see a local well, where herders travelled to from all over to fetch water.
Back at camp we celebrated the completion of the scanning by having a massive feast. The next day we left for Meroe, a reclusive village on the Nile. The plan was to hopefully scan some of the pyramids while staying at another German archeological camp. Unfortunately when we arrived the wind was extremely strong and so we could not do any scanning. Seeing the pyramids though was really amazing. We also saw some other historic buildings and got to ride a camel and take a swim in the Nile, hoping there was no bilharzia.
The trip had reluctantly come to an end and so we gathered all our dusty equipment and prepared to make our way back to Khartoum. At the airport it was time for more fun. To our expectations they wouldn’t let our equipment out through customs because we didn’t have the original letters from the customs official when we arrived in the Sudan. This is after the customs official told us he had to keep the original for himself and gave us a copy. After a while we engaged the help of an Emirates employee and finally got our equipment through. We boarded and breathed deep sighs. We had made it through the Sudan in one piece! It was a great adventure with a lot of challenges, with some spectacular memories to take home, not to mention an awesome heritage site done and documented for future generations.
333 laser scans, 598 RTK GPS points, 40 Panoramas, and 750 Photogrammetric pictures were captured in eight days to digitally preserve the Meroic temple of Musawwarat es-Sufra. The objectives of this task were for the preservation of this structure in 3D digital form as well as for site management and archeological interpretation. It is easy now to put our field trip into a numeric summary, but the collection of the data was both challenging and complicated, though in the end very worthwhile and enjoyable. >> Read this whole Field Diary