A Complete, Automatic Procedure for Pottery Documentation and Analysis

Abstract

The Computerized Archaeological Laboratory, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem started to operate on January 1 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">st</sup> 2010. Its purpose is to harness mathematical and computational methods to support archaeological research, documentation and visualization. The laboratory is equipped with modern, high precision scanners which provide digital three dimensional models of archaeological finds. We concentrated on ceramic and lithic artifacts, and developed several tools and algorithms which are used routinely as the standard procedure for their analysis and publications. The current paper summarizes the main novel features which are relevant to ceramics: 1) Efficient, high precision data acquisition using 3D scanners. 2) A stable and reliable algorithm which automatically finds the symmetry axis of pottery fragments. 3) A user friendly interface which creates print quality drawings of the objects. 4) A new procedure for automatic typology and classification of ceramic assemblages, which is based on mathematical representations of the cross-section profiles. These four steps of documentation and analysis are now the routine tasks in the lab. So far we have successfully tested the procedure for more than 10,000 fragments from a large variety of archaeological excavations.