Digital documentation of pottery

Christian ANSORGE¹, Martin KRENN², Marianne SINGER¹

(¹Archäologie-Service, Krems, Austria / ²Bundesdenkmalamt, Wien, Österreich)

This talk discusses and treats a digital approach for surveying and processing archaeological finds and pottery in 3D.
Several methods for digital survey of archaeological finds have been tested and presented in the last few years. In contrast to digital documentation which developed greatly on a technological basis, afore said methods are still in their beginnings.
Until now there have been only few approaches which could also prevail in account of economics. Main problems are encountered when regarding on one hand the great variety of materials, surfaces, object shapes, and on the other hand the high quality needed for publication images. Hitherto, publication standards have been aligned to paper only by which especially new approaches and methods encounter difficulties to meet the high expectations demanded of them.
Since 2005 the Federal Department of Monuments and the Archäologie-Service have been testing the application of close-up range scanners for compilation and digitalization of pottery in co-operation with the TU Vienna. The aim is to find an efficient way from digital survey of findings (pottery, small finds, etc.) to publication ready illustration. In the last two years several scanners with different technical and methodical approaches as well as different software for further processing of the scans have been tested.
On this basis an operational procedure for creation of 3D-images could be designed which sensibly expands and may even replace conventional hand drawings.

Keywords: close-range, pottery, portable 3D-scanning, efficient workflow