The Bamiyan Valley: Landscape Modeling for Cultural Heritage Visualization and Documentation

In this paper we present the modeling and visualization of the cultural heritage area of Bamiyan, Afghanistan. The region is situated ca 200 km north-west of Kabul and it was one of the major Buddhist centres until the ninth century AD. The two standing Buddhas belonged to some of the most famous Buddhist monuments world-wide. In 2001 they were destroyed through an act of vandalism by the Taleban militia. In our previous reports we have already presented the 3D computer reconstruction of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan while in this contribution we will demonstrate 3D visualization products generated with different software packages and a first attempt at generating a spatial information system.