Gerold EßER / Irmengard MAYER
(Vienna University of Technology)
Wall paintings of the subterranean Roman graveyards are a mirror of early Christian society in the late antiquity. Their iconographical content develops as a three-dimensional reference system in architectural space which can only be deciphered efficiently if ideal laboratory-like conditions are given.
Our paper intends to refer what is to become the latest standard in catacomb documentation, having evolved as one of the major research strategies of the Austrian START-Project “Die Domitilla-Katakombe in Rom. Archäologie, Architektur und Kunstgeschichte einer spätantiken Nekropole”. The approach is based on image laser scanning and mapping of separately taken photographs, creating photorealistic 3d models which are to serve as a new kind of data base for further studies. Problems of orientation and accuracy – created by using two different data sources, digital images and terrestrial laser scanner outputs – led to a laborious work-flow containing data acquisition, registration, preparation and cleansing, triangulation and texturing, still to be further optimized, but already today providing the desired 3d, photo-realistic and high-precision architectural models of the spatially defined burial areas. Problems however arise in some topographically important units, when trying to process even larger amounts of data, thus representing a technological threshold, that can hardly be overcome by non-specialist users like architects and archaeologists. Question marks in terms of tasks still remaining to be solved are e. g. problems of associating the models to 3d-capable GIS and the storage and providing of the final 3d-data-sets to generations of researchers yet to come, goals which will be defined in the course of the upcoming work process.