https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4594-967X
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ABSTRACT
As for every aspect in our daily lives, in the past two decades a digital turn has stormed Archaeology. More specifically, in the field of Palaeolithic research, 3D recording methods are currently starting to become an established standard in the documentation, study and analysis of lithic artefacts. Once made available to public, the DISAPALE project will represent one of the largest 3D-models repository of lithic artefact: after introducing the project, its goals and main characteristics, the paper first contextualizes the specific nature of the blank material in relation to the 3D recording techniques, and then presents a significant example of the workflow that has been implemented during the DISAPALE project and a comparison between 3D models of three objects realized with two different methods, briefly discussing their relative pros and cons.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their precious insights and inspired comments, and the editor for the patience and constant support during the whole review process. GDM would like to thank Beate Schneider for the details concerning the students’ quotas among the Museum’s visitors; Florian Quirin and Selbach for the work on the code behind the repository that hosts the DISAPALE database and the technical information included in the text; Stefanie Schaefer-Di Maida for shooting the photos used in one SfM model; the Pre- and Protohistoric collection of the FAU and its curators for the lending of the artefacts; and, finally, all the people involved in the DISAPALE project – its collaborators (J. Cetinakya and M. Hattermann), its hosting institution (the Neanderthal Museum), and its director, Dr. B. Auffermann.
Disclosure statement
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article.
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Notes on contributors
Gianpiero Di Maida
Gianpiero Di Maida, born in Palermo in 1980, has completed his PhD at the CAU Kiel (Germany) in 2018, discussing a thesis on the Lateglacial rock and mobile art record of Sicily, that has been awarded with the Johanna Mestorf Price 2019 and published as monograph in 2020. Since 2018, he has been serving as scientific manager of the DISAPALE project and of the digitization of the Wendel collection, both hosted by the Neanderthal Museum (Germany). His research interests include the prehistoric art of Europe, digital methods applied to the archaeological record, first peopling of Mediterranean islands, typo-technological analysis of lithic artifacts. His papers have been published on several international journals.
Sebastian Hageneuer
Sebastian Hageneuer, M.A. is a West Asian Archaeologist specialised in Digital and Computational Archaeology. During his studies of West Asian Archaeology, Prehistory and Assyriology at the Freie Universität Berlin, he founded a company for scientific visualisation in 2008 (artefacts-berlin.de), which is active until today. He has worked in several projects of the German Archaeological Institute, the University of Sorbonne- Paris, the British Museum London and many more. Since 2013, Sebastian writes his dissertation on the development history of archaeological reconstructions of the 19th and 20th century and the comparison to modern media. Since 2016, he is a research associate at the University of Cologne at the Institute of Archaeology in the Department of Archaeoinformatics. There he teaches and researches 3D documentation methods as well as 3D modelling and reconstruction approaches to Archaeology. Additionally, since 2020, he is also a research associate at the German Archaeological Institute, where he is part of the GlAssur project. His academic interests lie in digital teaching and learning as well as 3D technologies.