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 creation of a geodetic control network infrastructure connected to the ITRF by use of IGS data.
This required the provision of four permanent earth anchors outside the immediate area of interest, plus one close to the accommodation. To increase the chances of permanency, decoy earth anchors were established near to the earth anchors of actual interest. Three of the points had long period observations carried out to provide the link to the international network. This link will be computed using GPS data made available on the Internet by the International GPS Service (IGS).
• Control for future Ikonos imagery.
This required the coordination of points (plus accurate location diagrams of those points) that it is anticipated will be clearly visible in the Ikonos imagery to be obtained in April 2001. Although only five points were needed, each point was doubled up to provide a choice of points once the image is obtained. To assist with the identification of the points in the imagery, a track map was made using kinematic GPS.

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

• Marek Ziebart, School of Surveying, University of East London, England, who looked after things in the U.K. after I moved to Canada.
• Leica Geosystems in the U.K. who provided three GPS System 500 receivers and SKI-Pro free of charge.
• Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS) who provided radios free of charge.
• Leica Geosystems in Canada who provided SKI-Pro free of charge.

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