British Museum and Google Arts & Culture digitize Maya collection

The British Museum and Google Arts & Culture have launched a digital project making the museum's Ancient Maya collection accessible online. The collection, assembled by explorer and archaeologist Alfred Maudslay (1850–1931), includes photographs, casts, and documents from late 19th-century archaeological expeditions to Maya sites. In collaboration with the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the platform offers virtual tours, Poly Tours in virtual reality to Palenque and Chichén Itzá, and a Google Earth Voyager experience that places Maudslay's photographs in their original contexts. The collection contains over 800 glass plate negatives (350 from Mexico), over 1,000 pages of archives including Maudslay's personal diaries, and nearly 200 plaster casts from Mexico that have been 3D scanned. Jago Cooper, curator of the Africa, Oceania and Americas section at the British Museum, stated: 'This project is about the technology of imagination. Anyone in the world can now take an extraordinary journey from the British Museum's storerooms to the remarkable cities of the ancient Maya world.' Google Arts & Culture has previously collaborated with museums on projects such as Faces of Frida (a virtual retrospective on Frida Kahlo), Open Heritage (3D mapping of archaeological sites), the Met's API, and Meet Vermeer (an online retrospective with the Mauritshuis Museum).