*Archival Photogrammetry: Repurposing Excavation Photographs to 3-D Model Previous Excavations in Faynan, Jordan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Using photography to thoroughly document the excavation process is a common and long-standing practice on most archaeological excavations. Moreover, since the advent of digital photography, the number of photos captured of an excavation has generally increased. The Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (directed by Thomas E. Levy and Mohammad Najjar) has used digital photography to record their excavations since the project’s inception in 1997. While these original excavation photos were not intended for photogrammetry (using digital photos to produce 3-D models), their rigorous photography strategy affords an opportunity to potentially repurpose this archival data for 3-D modeling. In addition, these photos captured the excavation in its original state, before any damages of time. This poster explores this possibility based on archival photographs from the 2002 and 2006 excavations at Khirbat en-Nahas, an Iron Age copper smelting center in Faynan, Jordan. Using an excavation into a slag mound that has since collapsed as a case study, this poster presents the methods and results of this process along with one method for sharing this data using virtual reality. In doing so, it provides a case study of using archived photography to produce 3-D models for the preservation and dissemination of archaeological sites/excavations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32235