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Time Span's a cultural hub in Helmsdale in the Highlands.
It's a unique fusion of contemporary art, heritage and community spirit.
It's a centre for all ages and backgrounds where learning about past culture happens
through artefacts, stories and digital technologies.
The Scape Trust has been working with Time Span to develop a new digital interactive experience
of the results of a community archaeology project.
What you're looking at here is the remains of the 1598 salt pan.
This is an incredibly important building in Scottish history and archaeology.
This was the first industrial building in the Highlands.
It was used to make salt, which was an incredibly important industry in Scotland.
If you think of places with names like Preston Pans, that's reflecting that importance.
And what happened here was this was the most northerly outcrop of coal in the whole of Scotland,
here at Brawer, and they used the coal to evaporate seawater,
and then they took the salt and used it in the fishing industry and for domestic purposes.
This was the best example of a salt pan as well anywhere in Scotland,
but unfortunately now it's on the beach as you can see because the sea has come underneath it,
sucked the sand away and the masonry has collapsed.
This wall is over a metre thick and yet it hasn't been able to survive the sea.
Luckily we were able to do an excavation and during the excavation we got all sorts of evidence
about how they were living their lives, about the window glass they had,
about what they were eating, about the tools they were using,
and we've managed to recover that and we've taken that information and evidence and put it into our model.
So at the start of the project we engaged the community,
we contacted the local schools, we contacted other heritage societies,
we even sent letters to our MPs and MSPs and everybody got involved.
Everybody sent us letters of support.
We had a high number of volunteers to the site.
We had the pupils come down to actively dig on the site themselves
and they've continued to support the project over the last eight or nine years.
It's been a tremendous community effort.
So what we have here is a model of the Brawer Assault pans.
This is the site that was excavated over a number of years as a community project.
And so within the virtual model we're able to take real world information such as GIS information
from the Ordnance Survey and use that to sculpt the terrain in the model.
But we can also take information directly from the excavation.
For instance in the excavation a fireplace was discovered.
When it was discovered 3D laser scans were taken as well as photographs
and those have now been imported into the model.
So visitors can visit the actual site but they're also free to go into the model
and see the very real connection between the model and the actual archaeological site.
So in the case of the salt pans, the salt panning industry with kind of their coal fires
and kind of hot work all brought to life within the virtual model
in a way that maybe purely images or purely historical text might not bring to life so vividly.
But we're able to incorporate both the original sources and the archaeological material
and embed it within the interactive model.
So the great thing about the model is it's also accessible on the internet as well.
It means that we can reach a much larger audience. People who can't come up to Timespan itself
can look at the model, they can see the things that we found,
they can click on things and see for example the fireplace that we excavated.
We can tell the whole story, we can put in photographs, videos, sounds and all the rest of it
and that is accessible around the entire globe.
So as an archaeologist this is a fantastic way of getting our story out to everybody.
This is far more interesting than reading a site report
and it means that people of all ages are able to simply look at what we've been doing and hear the story.
It allows us also to introduce some of the characters who were involved in the excavation.
So here we have Little Callum who found an arrowhead during the excavation.
Here's a photograph of him and we can explain how we found the thing
and what we've done with the artefact since.
Younger people are really familiar with the technology and enjoy using it.
So they expect to have a really good experience and are enthusiastic.
But what is new here is that the experience is both educational and relevant to their community and to their place.
So the children who have experience of walking down Brawera breach
and seeing rocks in the sand dunes can now associate those with Brawera being a major industrial centre at the start of the 16th century
and thus can get an understanding of its and their place in history.
For us as staff at Timespan when you see the looks on visitors' faces as they leave the museum
and they say, you know, wow, I'm going to go home and tell everybody about this.
Now I know what life was like for my ancestors who lived here so long ago.
We've been so delighted to work with such an amazing team to develop this virtual world technology.
We really see the application of it. We can see the potential for it.
And we really just want to share this information with other museums and talk to funding bodies about it.
It's really exciting for the future.
The traditional museum experience involves the visitor going to a building
where artifacts are displayed and explained by text or audio.
Virtual world technologies like this one the Scape Trust has developed expands that experience
by offering an interactive and highly tangible digital way of engaging with the past.
The technology also enables Timespan to break out of their four walls
and offer engaging cultural heritage experiences for global online audiences to participate with.
There's a big new audience out there that can all come into our museums
and so I think digital technology is the way for the future.
It's got to be embraced with all the other forms of information we have
and I think in a few years it will be the norm, not the exception.
