Lancaster’s History Department and Manx National Heritage recently completed a project directed by Dr Patricia Murrieta-Flores, publishing online the first 3D digital corpus of medieval stones of the Isle of Man.

The isle has long been recognised as a cultural nexus, linking the British Isles with continental Europe, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. The material evidence it holds – in the form of medieval sculpture, and particularly its crosses – is of crucial importance to revealing and understanding these connexions.

Yet the majority of these stones had not been recorded in the modern era, so that almost no contemporary images were available, and had been investigated only sporadically in academic studies. The purpose of this project, then, was to make accessible, through high-resolution 3D scanning models, 210 monuments located in the Isle of Man.

In collaboration with Manx Heritage, Lancaster University and its partner Achaeovision scanned the monuments and started making them available through the online platform Sketchfab: https://sketchfab.com/manxnationalheritage. This fantastic digital resource will be used by researchers and students in projects related to conservation, history and archaeology, and is now available to all the public.

The dataset will be also used for training and research purposes at Lancaster in the new MA in Digital Humanities starting this autumn.