A New Method for the Large-Scale Documentation of Pottery Sherds Through Simultaneous Multiple 3D Model Capture Using Structure from Motion: Phoenician Carinated-Shoulder Amphorae from Tell el-Burak (Lebanon) as a Case Study

Abstract

This paper presents a new rapid, low-cost method for the large-scale documentation of pottery sherds through simultaneous multiple 3D model capture using Structure from Motion (SfM). The method has great potential to enhance and replace time-consuming and expensive conventional approaches for pottery documentation, i.e., 2D photographs and drawing on paper with subsequent digitization of the drawings. To showcase the method’s effectiveness and applicability, a case study was developed in the context of an investigation of the Phoenician economy at the Lebanese site of Tell el-Burak, which is based on a large collection of amphora sherds. The same set of sherds were drawn by an experienced draftsperson and then documented through SfM using our new workflow to allow for a direct comparison. The results show that the new technique detailed here is accessible, more cost-effective, and allows for the documentation of ceramic data at a far-greater scale, while producing more consistent and reproducible results. We expect that these factors will enable excavators to greatly increase digital access to their material, which will significantly enhance its utility for subsequent research.

Visualizing Variability in Ceramic Micro-Curvature though Novel 3D Morphometric Mapping and Sliced Segmental Extraction

“…Studies that utilize novel 3D software to reconstruct ceramic vessels from single sherds, piece together a collection of sherds into a full vessel (Banterle et al 2017;Stamatopoulos & Anagnostopoulos 2017), or seek to identify types of pottery through 3D imaging fall into the first group of recent studies, i.e., those that focus primarily on reconstruction or identification. Studies that utilize 3D mesh or cloud data as a base, but then extract 2D outline or other 2D data (such as length measurements) fall into the second group of studies (recent examples include Göttlich et al 2021 andHarush et al 2020). These studies often focus on a particular area of vessels from which to extract 2D data, and can be understood as more likely to be representative of potential variability than of data extracted from photos or line drawings, as any number of 2D outlines can be extracted from any number of regions of the 3D mesh.…”