Forensic Methods for the 3D Reconstruction of an Infant Burial in Arma Veirana Cave, Liguria, Italy

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Spatio-temporal models can function as detailed digital surrogates of archaeological sites, providing the context and content needed to enable analytical reasoning by means of interactive visualization. The starting point is often surveying techniques based on light detection and ranging as well as photogrammetry, which have been readily adopted into the digital archaeology toolbox, creating a means to construct a site and artifact specific 3D/4D data scaffold. The data at the source of digital surrogate creation has to be verifiable, accurate and trusted, and the Arma Veirana cave in Liguria, Italy has served as a catalyst for the synthesis of multiple site documentation and analytics techniques, creating a comprehensive cave model and coordinate system, and a catalog for the tracking of all artifacts. For this study, an infant burial was documented using calibrated and spatially referenced camera systems, allowing for camera correction, geometry extraction and alignment as part of the model synthesis workflow. Photogrammetric models of both specific artifacts and broad overviews containing common georeferenced markers are joined to create such a baseline model. The resulting digital surrogate allows for the analysis of the complex arrangement of burial goods, erosional displacement, and the documentation of delicate remains before removal.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26244