A new project of digital preservation has launched in Tumo aimed at scanning and processing Armenia’s Noravank monastery and Areni-1 cave.

A 13th-century Armenian monastery, Noravank is on the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, whereas the Areni-1 cave complex is a multicomponent site where the earliest known shoe and the earliest known winery in the world were announced to have been found in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

Experts from CyArk, a nonprofit organization in California, have already arrived in the country and started the 3D scanning process.

CyArk’s official mission statement is “digitally preserving cultural heritage sites through collecting, archiving and providing open access to data created by laser scanning, digital modeling, and other state-of-the-art technologies.”

The initiative started on October 23 in cooperation with Tumo and The My Armenia Program funded by USAID and implemented by the Smithsonian Institution.

The group will visit Noravank and the cave nearby on October 25 to carry out three-dimensional filming and process the collected materials later on.

3D scanning is a popular technique for analyzing a real-world object or environment to collect data on its shape and possibly its appearance.