Building Three-Dimensional Models of Archeological Sites by Creating a Specialized GIS for Archeologists John Samuelsen CIS 4914 Senior Project 4/14/04

Summary ► Motivation  Archaeologists are lacking tools to represent their sites in three dimensions. ► Problem  Current GIS do not have functions for common archeological uses and previous research projects for building 3D models of archaeological sites are site specific. ► Solution  Create a GIS that incorporates important archaeological data for any site.

Literature Sources [1]Acevedo, Daniel, Eileen Vote, David H. Laidlaw, and Martha S. Joukowsky. “Archaeological Data Visualization in VR: Analysis of Lamp Finds at the Great Temple of Petra, a Case Study”, Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2001 (San Diego, California. October 2001). [2]Devlin, Kate, Alan Chambers, and Duncan Brown. “Predictive Lighting and Perception in Archaeological Representations", AFRIGRAPH 2001, pp. 43—47 (2001). [3]Kennelly, Pat. "Createing Three-Dimensional Displays with ArcScene", CW Post Campus/Long Island University (as-of 12 Apr 2004). [4]Papagiannakis G., A. Foni, and N. Magnenat-Thalmann. “Real-Time Recreated Ceremonies in VR Restituted Cultural Heritage Sites”, CIPA XIXth International Symposium (30 September, July 2003). [5]Sundstedt, Veronica A High Fidelity Reconstruction of Ancient Egypt: The temple of Kalabsha, M.S. Dissertation, University of Bristol, UK, Department of Computer Science, (2003).

Work Completed ► Site’s topography is represented with satellite imagery overlaid.  Able to represent any site given a set of 3D points. ► Test Units are modeled and the corresponding textures can be mapped to the walls. ► Multiple movements and views, including the virtual first person view.  Sounds and trees help to make the site a virtual environment. ► Data and settings can be saved to a file. ► More than one site topography can be shown at once to show changes over time. ► New sites can be created by digitizing a contour map.

Results from “Site Explorer” Figure 1. Hontoon Island in the present.Layer Mesh/TrianglesPoints Test Unit List TU1 Side1 Side2... TU2… TextureTreesSound

Results Continued Figure 2. Hontoon Island in the past. Figure 3. Test Unit Test unit demo as an.avi file. Figure 4. View from the present with the past shown to be 30 feet higher.

Conclusions ► Positives:  Site Explorer’s ability to load data from any site and represent the data accurately will allow any archaeologist to get valuable information from the program.  The ability to travel on the surface of Hontoon Island’s past allows archaeologists to see what the island would have looked like if they were in the past and walking on the island.  Although excavating is a destructive process, using Site Explorer can help preserve the data that is collected like the data shown in Figure 3.  Common archaeological functions such as test units give archaeologists the ability to look at stratigraphy in 3D and keep multiple data sets together in one location. ► Negatives:  Not compatible with 2D commercial software that is commonly used by archaeologists.  Site Explorer does not include complex objects such as buildings. ► It would have been useful to take a class on MFC or user interfaces before having worked on the project. Much time was spent on the understanding and building the project within the windows interface. ► Future work:  The inclusion of more functions for archaeologists.  Allowing for the insertion of artifacts. Problems exist with generalization of artifacts.  Multiple levels on the bottom of test units for textures of features, levels, or strata.