Aurelia LUREAU1 | Herbert MASCHNER2 | Victor Manuel LOPEZ-MENCHERO BENDICHO3 | Jeffrey DU VERNAY2 | James MCLEOD2 | Vincent MATTHEW2 | Marco CALLIERI4
(1 Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France & Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy | 2 USA | 3 Spain | 4 CNR ISTI Visual-Computing Lab, Italy)

Keywords: remote-sensing, castle, lasergrammetry, photogrammetry, documentation

Abstract:
The Castillo de La Muela in Consuegra, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, is a medieval castle that has a long history starting from the Xth century. It is now one of the most well preserved castles of the region and it has undergone a lot of restoration campaigns.
A lot of questions are still not answered about this castle: it’s the state of preservation and the various restoration campaigns need to be assessed and documented, the castle needs to be presented with new technics to the public in order to attract new visitors, and the surroundings of the castle and its lost outer surrounding walls have yet to be entirely found and documented.
In order to answer as many questions as possible, the castle was surveyed with remote-sensing technics by the CVAST from USF, Tampa, in collaboration with the Universities of Castilla-La Mancha and the Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. The team used a lot of remote-sensing technologies to survey the castle and its surroundings: terrestrial laser scanning was used to document the exterior and interior of the castle; aerial photogrammetry by drone was used to document the upper parts of the castle and the whole hill on which it sits; terrestrial photogrammetry was used to document the inner parts of the castle, and 360 panoramas were made in order to create a virtual tour for the visitors.
This survey will be included in a larger campaign using other remote-sensing technologies such as geophysics and aerial surveys using thermal imaging, but also well-known methods such as GIS and cartography will complete the new documentation in order to present all the new data to the public and contemplate an excavation campaign.

Relevance conference / Relevance session:
The survey campaign is about documenting Cultural Heritage in a remote area of Spain with new technologies, and how combining those to obtain the best of each would provide the best documentation.

Innovation:
Remote-sensing has been used before to document medieval structures, but rarely on a building this size and possibly never to that extent of precision and completion that the three surveys provided.

References:

  1. Landes, P.Grussenmeyer, et all. Combination of terrestrial Recording Techniques for 3D Object Modelling regarding topographic constraints. Example of the Castle of Haut-Andlau, Alsace, France. XXIth CIPA International Symposium, 2007.
  2. Guidi, F.Remondino, et all. A multi-resolution methodology for the 3D modelling of large and complex archaeological areas. Int. J. Architect. Comput. 2009.