![]() ![]() Twenty-five students-six of whom returned a second year-have participated so far. (University of Rochester photo / Bob Marcotte) He also appreciates the lessons he’s learned about the importance of working as part of a team to solve problems. The software and modeling skills he has used during the field school will serve him well as he pursues a career in aeropace engineering, he says. He has been spending 7 to 10 hours each week this fall analyzing data gathered from the field school for a paper he is co-authoring with four other students. ![]() He says participation in the field school the last two summers has allowed him “to speak to my past, to be connected to those in my ancestry-and to the ancestors of my friends-who suffered at the hands of others.”īACK IN THE LAB | Marcos dos Santos ’20 of mechanical engineering has participated in the field school each of the last two summers. Marcos dos Santos ’20 is a mechanical engineering major whose Brazilian ancestral roots extend to West Africa. Perucchio, a professor and chair of mechanical engineering and director of the Archaeology, Technology and Historical Structures (ATHS) program, designed the field school as an interdisciplinary endeavor-one that would also immerse students in the historical and cultural context of the structures they study. “You cannot study the healthy body if you don’t study the diseased body as well,” says Renato Perucchio, who launched the field school in collaboration with the University of Ghana and with permission from the Ghana Museum and Monuments Board (GMMB).īut the field school involves more than just taking measurements and creating models. And, when they return to Rochester, they apply finite element analysis to those digital models to better understand how the damage at Fort Amsterdam occurred, and how similar damage can be prevented at Elmina. They use photogrammetry and CAD software to create detailed 3D models. The students use a drone, a laser scanner, and surveying tools to carefully document the dimensions of every room, vault, and courtyard. An interactive GIS map showing how the Ghana coastal forts were built and then changed hands over five centuries.A breathtaking overhead pan of Elmina, taken from the drone in slow motion.Michael Jarvis, working with Josh Romphf and Blair Tinker in the River Campus Library’s Digital Scholarship Lab, has created a website for the field school. (Digital Heritage of West African Monuments Field School photo) IN THE FIELD | Field school participants at Fort Amsterdam in 2018. They have focused primarily on analyzing the architecture and materials of two of those structures-Elmina Castle, the oldest, built in 1482 but still largely intact, and Fort Amsterdam, the first English fort built on the Gold Coast in 1631, now badly deteriorated. ![]() This is where University of Rochester students and faculty have conducted the Digital Heritage of West African Monuments Field School each of the last three summers. They constitute a single world heritage site, protected by UNESCO as a “monument not only to the evils of the slave trade, but also to nearly four centuries of pre-colonial Afro-European commerce on the basis of equality.” Over the centuries, they’ve changed hands from the Portuguese to the Dutch and British, and most recently to the Ghanaians. Initially the forts and castles facilitated the gold trade later they held enslaved people waiting to be shipped to the Americas. Twenty historic forts and castles extend along 500 kilometers of the Ghana coast, some crumbling ruins, others remarkably intact. ![]()
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