In recent years, novel documentation, preservation and presentation methods have been introduced to deal with challenges faced by archaeology in contemporary society. In particular, temporal analyses and multi-temporal 3D reconstruction have been considered in order to explicitly consider how time affects the archaeological sites. Such 4D reconstruction methods provide crucial information to the archaeologists in various scenarios. In particular, these ranges from studying the evolution of the site and its context to its repairing in cases of damages due to natural or anthropic causes or in cases of deliberate destruction, as is recently observed in the Near East. On the other hand, technologies like virtual and augmented reality, smart interfaces and massively parallel computing, provide methods to collect and process large amounts of space-time data, as well as proposing novel ways for interacting with this data and manipulate relevant semantic information. Such methods can also provide useful tools to the archaeologists facilitating their tasks during archaeological excavation. Namely, these tools enable the participation of larger teams in the monitoring and documentation of remote sites, and allow a better dissemination and presentation of discoveries both via traditional and digital means.
Building on the aforementioned methods, this project introduces a system for creating a 4D reconstruction of an excavation site both online and offline, enabling to add possible semantic annotations of relevant discoveries via smart interfaces based on gaze tracking, gesture and speech recognition. With its ability to online generate 3D models, the system allows teams to participate to the excavation from remote locations. At the same time, the final 4D semantically annotated models of the site and the artefacts are crucial for ongoing and future archaeological operations and provide precious information which will be accessible to the general public via different media.
Recently, there has been a clear interest in conjugating the expertise of both computer scientists and archaeologists toward the development of novel technologies supporting the preservation and restoration of cultural heritage.
In this regard, temporal analyses are becoming central to cultural heritage research for the investigation of change, from landscape to architectural scales. Moreover, multi-temporal 3D reconstruction are fundamental for safeguarding and maintaining all forms of cultural heritage. Such studies are today forming the basis for any kind of decision regarding intervention on cultural heritage, since they help in assessing involved risks and issues.
In March 2017, it has taken place the international workshop "Towards a European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science". During this event, the E-RIHS Project, funded by the EU, supported by Miur, Mibact, Mise and sponsored by the City of Florence and the Tuscany Region, has been presented. E-RIHS purpose is to build a single cutting edge world-leading infrastructure in the research field of cultural, natural and archaeological heritage, with laboratories and centers scattered throughout Europe, which are able to provide access to high-level scientific instrumentation, innovative methods and databases. Also recently, the Joint Programming Initiative in Cultural Heritage and Global Change announced new funding opportunities for transnational proposals in the area of Digital Heritage.
With the recent advancements in the field of robotics, novel methods have been applied for both mapping and digitizing those archaeological sites which were inaccessible by humans. In this respect, the EU project ROVINA proposed innovative solutions allowing for the digital preservation of the Roman catacombs with mobile robots. ROVINA resorts to techniques in the context of 3D reconstruction, mapping under uncertainty, semantic analysis, object detection and online learning, environment analysis, autonomous navigation and exploration, as well as intuitive user interfaces to build accurate models of these hard-to-access environments.
Along the same lines, in 2015, the research project ArcheoBOT has been funded by Sapienza Università di Roma. ArcheoBOT is a robot specifically devoted to the scanning of archaeological sites. It is able to register and map both horizontal and vertical surface, thus giving 3D rendering of the wells made by the plunderers. The achievements of ArcheoBOT are to provide novel technology that supports the preservation of cultural heritage by allowing the acquisition of digital models in hard-to-access environments, to develop novel techniques to construct large 3D textured models of these poorly structured environments, to offer a cost-effective support for performing continuous monitoring of these sites and to enable comparative analysis that will allow to devise better preservation plans.
In 2014, the European project Cultural Heritage Through Time (CHT2) started. The aim of this project was to develop time-varying 3D products, from landscape to architectural scale, to envisage and analyse lost scenarios or visualize changes due to anthropic activities or intervention, pollution, wars, earthquakes or other natural hazards.
Multidisciplinary efforts have also been devoted to embed heritage science into a trusted environment across technologies, disciplines and borders for researchers to share and analyse data.
In this context, in 2013, the FP7 ARIADNE project integrated existing archaeological research data infrastructures so that researchers can use the various distributed datasets and new and powerful technologies as an integral component of the archaeological research methodology. ARIADNE also enabled trans-national access of researchers to data centres, tools and guidance, and the creation of Web-based services based on common interfaces to data repositories, availability of reference datasets and usage of innovative technologies.
Toward this direction, the H2020 project PARTHENOS, started in 2015, aimed at strengthening the cohesion of research in the broad sector of Linguistic Studies, Humanities, Cultural Heritage, History, Archaeology and related fields through a thematic cluster of European Research Infrastructures, integrating initiatives, e-infrastructures and other world-class infrastructures, and building bridges between different, although tightly, interrelated fields.
PARTHENOS proposed to achieve this objective through the definition and support of common standards, the coordination of joint activities, the harmonization of policy definition and implementation, and the development of pooled services and of shared solutions to the same problems.