QGIS Time Manager, for archaeological drawing on RTI-like raster series

Hi all,

I go on today writing about the Time Manager plugin of QGIS we saw in our last post. 

This time I will focus the attention on one of the alternative (and unconventional) use we can do of this tool for archaeological aims: an archaeological vector drawing based on RTI-like raster series.
Of course, when I speak about archaeological vector drawing, I mean a GIS based technique (like the one described in this old post). We already developed a little bit further this methodology in order to use it in a semi-automatic way for archaeological finds (related post 1 and 2; bibliography here), so that this post can be seen as an integration of that work-flow. For the concept of RTI, I suggest you to read +Rupert Gietl 's post about a large scale case of study for such an application and my post about the open source tool developed by Giampaolo Palma (Visual Computing Lab of the CNR-ISTI).
The concept of RTI-like raster series is pretty simple: if in a common archaeological excavation is planned an RTI documentation (e.g. to further analyse particular artefacts such as small pottery fragments, coins, inscriptions in stone, etc...), than it is also possible to use some of the original pictures (with different light conditions) to simulate an RTI viewer within any GIS software. Once one of this picture has been rectified (and georeferenced, when needed), the related worldfile can be used also for all the other images (considering that they have all the same size), so that in QGIS it is pretty simple to create a raster series through the Time Manager plugin.
The video below shows the result of this operation on a pottery fragment from the excavation of Khovle Gora, an archaeological mission in Georgia which we supported for the University of Innsbruck (Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik).

I hope this post will be useful, have a nice evening!

Rediscovering Ancient Identities in Kotayk (Armenia)

Since some years crowdfunding has become a new resource in archeology, providing support to those projects which have difficulties in financing the many research activities connected with historical investigations in general.

Despite our team has not yet tested the true potential of this system, today I would like to help some colleagues and friends who decided to experiment this way of funding for their expedition in the Kotayk region (Armenia). 

Their mission started in summer 2013 and tries "to register and study all the archaeological sites along the upper Hrazdan river basin, in the Armenian province of Kotayk. The project is organized by the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, the International Association of Mediterranean and Oriental Studies (ISMEO) and the Italian Foreign Affairs Minister." Up to now the team achieved some remarkable results, locating 56 historical/archaeological sites and starting an excavation in the well preserved iron age fortress of Solak.

If you want to support their effort in recording and analyzing archaeological evidences in the Kotayk region, you can find more details in their official Indiegoo page.

I personally met most of the team members (Dr. +Manuel Castelluccia, Dr. Roberto Dan and Dr. +Riccardo La Farina) between 2010 and 2011, when they joined (between 2010 and 2011) the missions of Aramus (Armenia) and Khovle Gora (Georgia), in which I was working with Arc-Team for the Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik. 

The visit to the city of Vardzia, during the mission in Khovle Gora (2011)

There I could appreciate their commitment and professionalism. For this reason I wish a very successful 2015 mission for the Kotayk Survey Project, hoping to get soon some feedbacks from this interesting project also here in ATOR!

A moment of relax during the mission in Khovle Gora (2011)

WebRTIViewer

Hi all,

I write this post to complete the one +Rupert Gietl did regarding Large Scale Reflectance Transformation Imaging. As you read in that article, Rupert, using +GRASS GIS, re-built virtually the necessary light conditions to process an RTI image of an entire archaeological area. 

This is just one of the test we are carrying on with RTI techniques, since we are trying to evaluate this methodology under different aspects. Obviously, during our experiments, we encounter interesting researches carried on by other institutions. 

This post regards one of the projects we found on our way (I will write soon about other related works) and, more precisely, a software to share RTI images through internet: WebRTIViewer. Actually the source code of the application, an HTML5-WebGL viewer, is release under the therms of the General Public License 3 (GPL 3) on the website of its author: +Gianpaolo Palma.

Here is an example of its application, using Rupert's data of the archaeological site (better visualized here). To see it, just turno on the light and, holding the left button, move your mouse around.

The software comes with two binary tools (one for Windows 32 bit and the other for Windows 64 bit), which are necessary to prepare the RTI images for the viewer. For this reason I wrote to Giampolo Palma to ask if there would be the possibility to insert WebRTIViewer and the other applications in ArcheOS (to do this we would need the access to the source code of the binary tools, called webGLRTIMaker) and he kindly answered that he likes the idea and he would agree, but before to release the code of the webGLRTIMaker under an open license he will ask the opinion of his labs colleagues (the Visual Computing Lab). This institute, part of the Italian CNR-ISTI, is the same that develops other nice Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) software, usefull in archaeology, such as MeshLab, which is often in our post, or 3DHOP (soon a post about it). Hopefully, if everything goes well, we will have another nice tool to add to the ArcheOS software selection, helping Cultural Heritage professionals in sharing data through RTI technologies.

Here below you can see again webRTIViewer in action (better visualized here), this time with data coming from the archaeological excavation of Khovle Gora (in Georgia), where we work for the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and support technically the fieldwork directed by Dr. Walter Kuntner of the Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik.

QGIS, oriental archaeology (basic tutorial 1)

Hi all,
today I start a new series of basic tutorial regarding the use of FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) in archeology (oriental archeology, to be exact). One of the most difficult thing in doing tutorial is to understand what people needs (especially when the necessities are simple). For this reason, following what the software developers call the KISS principle, I'll take the occasion to record the videotutorial I am doing to help some friends in organizing a project in which we should participate.
The mission regards an archaeological expedition in the Hrazdan river valley (Kotayk region, Armenia) and it is a collaboration between the IsMEO (it: Istituto Italiano per il Medio e l'Estremo Oriente; en: Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East) and the ISMA-CNR (it: Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo Antico; en: Institute of Studies on Ancient Mediterranean See). The project is leaded by the Italian archaeologists Manuel Castelluccia, Roberto Dan, Riccardo La Farina e Mattia Raccidi.
I will record these tutorial answering the questions I receive day by day from the Italian team in order to meet their basic needs. The first problem regards how to create simple maps to illustrate the project using a GIS (instead of closed raster and vector image software). Obviously the series of tutorial will be inspired by the FLOSS philosophy, so, as I wrote, just this kind of tools will be used (in particular the operating system you see in the video is my testing version of ArcheOS 5, not yet released...), but this means also that will be used just open data. For example one of the first task to face will be to find open geographic data to trace our maps: normally it is not a good idea to present our works using Google Maps or Google Earth, due to the restrictions on this material, which I suggest to read carefully (quote from the Google Permission guidelines: "You may not use Google Maps or Google Earth as the basis for tracing your own maps or other geographic content").
For these reasons, the first videoturial shows how to use a simple GIS (Quantum GIS) to set up a fast project. Initially we will install the plugin OpenLayers to allow us to use open geographic data (like OpenCycleMap from OpenStreetMap) to trace our maps (in the Projected Coordinate System WGS84/Pseudo-Mercator). Than we will add a new vector layer (by now we will use a shapefile, but later, when a real database will be defined, we will introduce the SpatiaLite format), using some open data from the Innsbruck University projects in oriental archeology (Aramus and Khovle Gora, leaded by Walter Kuntner and Sandra Heinsch) and setting a very simple database schema. After we will fill the attributes of our two example sites and choose some graphic parameters (using for this purpose the same attributes). Finally we will do a very simple layout (the one you can see in the image below).

Just an example of a very basic layout

Like always I uploaded the videotutorial on the wiki of the DADP project, but you can see it also here:

I hope it can be useful!

3D for archaeological finds

One of the most common question we receive about SfM and Computer Vision techniques is: "is it possible to document in 3D also small objects like archaeological finds?". The answer is yes, it is, and there are two possible ways:

1. putting the object to record on a turntable (with a black panel as background) and taking pictures from a fix point  (as I described in this post)
2. taking pictures walking around the object (the easiest way)

Untill now, in both cases, it is better to use Bundler 3 instead Bundler 4 (that seems to have some problems with symmetrical objects). Anyway for option 2 there is no need to "erase the background" so it is possible to use also the newest version of the sofware (which is the one inside Python Photogrammetry Toolbox). This is because other objects in the background can help Bundler to find the right position of the cameras for every picture. the image below is an example of this situation: I took the photos walking around the archaeological find, which was simply placed on a piece of wood (over a normal A4 paper, for metric references).  

3D documentation of arcaheological finds with Bundler and PMVS2

The archaeological find in the picture comes from the mission in Khovle Gora (Georgia) of University of Innsbruck, Department of Ancient History and Near Eastern Studies, (Walter Kuntner and Sandra Heinsch) and Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (Prof. Vakhtang Licheli).