Measuring deformations of wheel-produced ceramics using high resolution 3D reconstructions

1. Introduction 1 Many artifacts, such as wheel-produced ceramics, are intended to be axially symmetric. Therefore, the boundaries of their intersections by planes that are perpendicular to the axis of rotation should be perfect circles (we shall use the term " horizontal sections " for these sections). However, these ideally symmetric objects may suffer deformations when still on the wheel, or during the drying and firing stages. As a result, the afore-mentioned sections will deviate from perfect circles. In traditional archaeological publications which rely on hand drawn single profiles, this information is completely lost – the drawn profile can only represent an average profile. The introduction of accurate measuring devices such as 3D scanning cameras (Leymarie et al., representations of pottery available. Using these data, it is now possible to 1 Other version of this research was already published by some of us as part of a paper dealing with morphological analysis of planar curves (Saragusti et al. 2005).