{"id":142059991518,"date":"2019-10-16T08:00:31","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T06:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sketchfab.com\/blogs\/community\/?p=142059991518"},"modified":"2019-10-01T15:23:05","modified_gmt":"2019-10-01T13:23:05","slug":"documenting-ancient-discoveries-on-the-hippos-excavations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sketchfab.com\/blogs\/community\/documenting-ancient-discoveries-on-the-hippos-excavations\/","title":{"rendered":"Documenting Ancient Discoveries on the Hippos Excavations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction to the Hippos Excavations<\/h2>\n

My name is Michael Eisenberg, I\u2019m a senior researcher and a lecturer at the University of Haifa, Israel where I work at the Institute of Archaeology and teach at the Department of Archaeology.<\/p>\n

My main field of interest is Classical Archaeology in the wider perspective. My main research focus is military architecture and the art of siege warfare during the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been excavating for quite a long time now in various sites but my second home, for the last 20 years now, is the ancient city of Antiochia Hippos of the Decapolis.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/sketchfab.com\/3d-models\/hippos-sussita-of-the-decapolis-a3d05a4abe31470284930e04ced059e8<\/p>\n

This marvelous site is located to the east of the Sea of Galilee, overlooking the sea and the eastern Galilee from the top of a mountain.<\/p>\n

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As the director of the Hippos Excavations Project<\/a> I am in an endless pursuit of high quality documentation of the site, finds in the field and lab and then the working process itself. Being a professional photographer I benefit from both worlds and usually conduct the main photography-based documentation by myself. Such documentation is vital in field archaeology, even more than in general heritage documentation or in the lab, as you won\u2019t get another chance to capture the moment when the artifact was unearthed. Capturing the moment is vital in many cases in our field; sometimes its significance is appreciated only years later as part of the post-field analysis or while preparing an exhibition.<\/p>\n

Using 3D on the Excavation<\/h2>\n

3D model-based documentation arrived to our field around 6 years ago and since then has become part of our field routine up to the point where most of the manual and machine based measurements and drafting are no longer needed. The main use of the measurement machinery nowadays in the field is to supply ongoing height differences while excavating and provide accurate positioning, up to 1 cm accuracy, for setting up the markers for the 3D model at each field.<\/p>\n

Excavations are conducted usually just for one main season a year, about a month long. Most of the team is coming from around the globe; English is the official expedition language as well as the language used for the database (based on Ochre<\/a> from the University of Chicago). Within the frame of this DB and on local servers we upload terabytes of digital photography files each season. Photogrammetry is becoming a vital part of our daily life at the site, and starts with:<\/p>\n