Abstract:This article examines the question of authenticity in relation to 3D visualisation of historic objects and monuments. Much of the literature locates their authenticity in the accuracy of the data and/or the realism of the resulting models. Yet critics argue that 3D visualisations undermine the experience of authenticity, disrupting people's access to the materiality, biography and aura of their historic counterparts. The ACCORD project takes questions of authenticity and 3D visualisation into a new arena -that of community heritage practice -and uses rapid ethnographic methods to examine whether and how such visualisations acquire authenticity. The results demonstrate that subtle forms of migration and borrowing occur between the original and the digital, creating new forms of authenticity associated with the digital object. Likewise, the creation of digital models mediates the authenticity and status of their original counterparts through the networks of relations in which they are embedded. The current pre-occupation with the binary question of whether 3D digital models are authentic or not obscures the wider work that such objects do in respect to the cultural politics of ownership, attachment, place-making and regeneration. The article both advances theoretical debates and has important implications for heritage visualisation practice.

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The Outer Hebrides Coastal Community Marine Archaeology Pilot Project (OHCCMAPP) was developed to test practical approaches to intertidal and marine archaeological site investigation by incorporating coastal, geoarchaeological, and aerial and underwater archaeological specialists with a strong focus on community engagement and public outreach. The OHCCMAPP's thematic objectives were not temporally constrained, but sought information on submerged prehistoric landscapes, marine resource exploitation, and maritime transportation related to the Outer Hebrides Maritime Historic Environment. The project was designed to start broadly with the entire archipelago under consideration, before study areas were narrowed down to medium-scale, and eventually, following an evidence-based approach, investigations undertaken at the site level. Consideration was given to working within optimal tidal conditions to ensure a maximum area of coverage in the Intertidal and Marine Archaeology in the Hebrides, Scotland intertidal zones. A phased approach was taken over two field seasons, with desk-based assessments of landscapes and previously recorded material forming the foundations from which to build original field surveys in under-represented areas, mainly centered around the coasts of sea lochs (fjords) around the Outer Hebrides. This article presents a simplified methodology and results of the 2011-2012 field campaigns with associated discussion and a more detailed case study site.

In this paper, we discuss how community co-production of heritage records facilitates the production and negotiation of new forms of value and significance. We draw on case studies from the ACCORD project, which used 3D digital technologies for community engagement through co-creation, to explore how a site's significance can be affected and challenged through community recording. Whilst multiple modes of recording operate in this way, digital 3D recording, long held as the sole domain of the technical expert, is often deployed by heritage professionals as a means of enhancing authorised historic and scientific values through the sophisticated and precise recording of a site's physical structure. Here we argue that these recording techniques can also offer a means of exploring and challenging existing authorised regimes of significance and insignificance, giving voice to alternative and richer perspectives through the recording process itself, as much as through the resultant record. This challenges orthodox thinking about both the primary purpose and effects of digital recording and opens up new directions for their use in heritage practice.

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