An Information System for Medieval Archaeology Based on Photogrammetry and Archaeological Database: The Shawbak Castle Project

The paper presents an interdisciplinary project which is a work in progress towards a 3D Geographical Information System (GIS) dedicated to Cultural Heritage with a specific focus application on the Castle of Shawbak, one of the best preserved rural medieval settlements in the entire Middle East). The Shawbak archaeological project is a specific and integrated project between medieval archaeological research and computer vision done thanks to a long cooperation between University of Florence and CNRS, LSIS, Marseille. Focusing mainly on stratigraphical analysis of upstanding structures we provide archaeologists with two-step pipeline. First a survey process using photogrammetry, both in a traditional way with additional annotations and using the most advanced technique to obtain dense maps and then a tool for statistical analysis. Two main applications are presented here, stratigraphy analysis with Harris matrix computed on the fly from the 3D viewer and statistical tools, clustering operation on ashlar in order to show new relationships between the measured artifacts. All these developments are written in Java within Arpenteur framework[4].