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I. Mayer, G. Esser:
"3d-geometry and 3d-texture. Documenting early-Christian wall paintings at the Domitilla Catacomb in Rome.";
Talk: 12. Internationale Tagung Archäologie und Computer, Wien; 11-05-2007 - 11-07-2007; in: "Archäologie und Computer 2007 - Workshop 12: Kulturelles Erbe und Neue Technologien. 05.07. November 2007", Phoibos Verlag, 12 (2007), ISBN: 978-3-85161-002-4; 11 pages.

Wall paintings of the subterranean roman graveyards are a mirror of early-Christian society in late antiquity. Their iconographical content develops as a three-dimensional reference system in architectural space, which can only efficiently be deciphered under optimal laboratory-like conditions.
Our paper is intended to refer what is to become the latest standard in catacomb documentation, being evolved as one of the major strategies of the Austrian START-Project "Die Domitilla-Katakombe in Rom. Archäologie, Architektur und Kunstgeschichte einer spätantiken Nekropole". The approach is based on image laser scanning and mapping of separately taken photographs, creating photorealistic 3d models, which are to serve as a new kind of data-base for further studies. Problems of orientation and accuracy - created by using two different data-sources of digital images and terrestrial laser scanner outputs - led to a laborious work-flow containing data acquisition, register the data to the overall reference system, select and clean the right data for the triangulation and triangulate the mesh, reduce the triangles to a reasonable and manageable number and texture the model with perfect exposed pictures still to be optimized, but finally providing the desired 3d, photo-realistic and high-precision architectural models of spatially restricted burial areas. Problems however arise in some topographically important units, when trying to process even larger amounts of data, thus representing a technological threshold, that can hardly be overcome by non-specialist users like architects and archaeologists. Question marks in terms of tasks to be solved are represented by problems of associating the models to 3d-capable GIS and to the storage and providing of the final 3d-data-sets to generations of researchers yet to come, requirements which will be defined in the course of the upcoming work process.

Archäologie, Italien, Rom, Domitilla-Katakombe, 3D-Laserscanning

Project Head Marina Döring-Williams:
START-Programm (FWF): Die Domitilla-Katakomben in Rom - Archäologie, Architektur und Kunstgeschichte einer spätantiken Nekropole