Antonella FURNO
(University of Siena, Italy)
Abstract: Each project of building archaeology includes several phases: the preliminary stage in which identify the aims of the project, then a phase of the fieldwork in which take all the necessary records and finally a phase of restitution in which the recordings are analyzed and oriented on each topographical point with the production of orthophotos to achieve a high level of knowledge of the architectural structure taken into analysis. At this point, all the archaeological cognitive instruments can be applied to (like stratigraphic interpretation, cronotipology of the material used, model buildings, construction techniques, characteristics of the mortars, mensiocronology) in order to obtain the information necessary to understand the work in progress history of the building. With the introduction of digital methods, the recording information have undergone a revolution that has allowed the management of numerous archives. In this context, I suggest to analyze the importance of man aging a digital archive of all metadata related to it. In this context it is included and discussed the opportunity to use the instrument of Google Maps “Google StreetView” as a special data storage of images. On these basis, we attempt to reconstruct a 3D model of SS. Stefano e Silvestro Church in the small town of Castelnuovo (L’Aquila) in the district of San Pio delle Camere, which was completely destroyed by the earthquake on April 2009. The wireframe of the church was rebuilt by deducting the minimum metric information putting into the plan of the church derived from the archive of the land register, using the helpful tool AutoCAD and relying wholly on Google StreetView images and topographic points taken after the quake. A part of the church was created with the measurement of frontal images, while the east side of the church was recreated with the traditional geometric method of the inverse perspective: with a single image you can extrapolate the real distances or proportions of the three dimensional reality of the object. A good result if we consider the low resolution image, but it is to be taken into account that Google holds the original photos and the so called “raw files” containing all the metadata necessary to provide the technical information.
Keywords: BuildingArcheology, GoogleStreetView Eartquake