Documentation of Roman Excavations by Laser Scanning

Nowadays 3D laserscanned point clouds are used in many fields of sciences. This paper presents a comparison study of the established geodetic technologies and laserscanning. The modern technology allows more details high accuracy, rapid data acquisition, and more realistic new products – such as three dimensional virtual models or textured meshes – or even orthophotos can be easily created. First of all we studied the required archeologic documentation of various excavations and realized that better results, more realistic and detailed documentation can be reached at the same time as with traditional surveys. We developed a mapping process for archeologically relevant objects – ground plans, overviews, brickworks – which is preferred in many cases. In case of roman tessellated pavements or brickwork drawings the documentation process can be shortened, and human resource can be saved using ortophotos or post-processing. Although the post-processing requires time, it is productive and accelerates the work in the excavation field. Three dimensional wireframe models or the point cloud itself help us to draw reconstruction plans or in other applications like creating chronoscope. In every respect, the most important view was that we wanted to get such a documentation, which can present more information than the traditional methods and aims to create a global archeological informational system.