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International Merv Project - 2000

During September 2000, Dr. Peter Dare joined the International Merv Project in Turkmenistan. Now called Mary, Merv is the oldest and most completely preserved of the oasis cities along the Silk Route in central Asia. A World Heritage Site, Merv's history goes back over 4000 years. It was known as a centre of learning as well as commerce and the Islamic scholar Omar Khayyam wrote several works on mathematics while resident there. The International Merv Project, established by the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, England, has been visiting the archaeological site since 1992. Dr. Dare's fundamental role in the project was as follows:

The Ikonos image will be used to create a base map of the site allowing individual isolated maps of the site to be related together on one common coordinate system. This work will not be completed until the imagery is obtained in April 2001, but a technical report concentrating on the GPS work should be available before then. A paper on the work was presented at the Institute of Navigation 2001 National Technical Meeting. You can download or view the paper here.

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the generous help of

Above: GPS at work as part of the International Merv Project - 2000