Digital Reunification of the Parthenon and its Sculptures

Abstract
The location, condition, and number of the Parthenon sculptures present a considerable challenge to archeologists and researchers studying this monument. Although the Parthenon proudly stands on the Athenian Acropolis after nearly 2,500 years, many of its sculptures have been damaged or lost. Since the end of the 18th century, its surviving sculptural decorations have been scattered to museums around the world. We propose a strategy for digitally capturing a large number of sculptures while minimizing impact on site and working under time and resource constraints. Our system employs a custom structured light scanner and adapted techniques for organizing, aligning and merging the data. In particular this paper details our effort to digitally record the Parthenon sculpture collection in the Basel Skulpturhalle museum, which exhibits plaster casts of most of the known existing pediments, metopes, and frieze. We demonstrate our results by virtually placing the scanned sculptures on the Parthenon.
Description

        
@inproceedings{
:10.2312/VAST/VAST03/041-050
, booktitle = {
The 4th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage
}, editor = {
David Arnold and Alan Chalmers and Franco Niccolucci
}, title = {{
Digital Reunification of the Parthenon and its Sculptures
}}, author = {
Stumpfel, Jessi
and
Tchou, Christopher
and
Yun, Nathan
and
Martinez, Philippe
and
Hawkins, Timothy
and
Jones, Andrew
and
Emerson, Brian
and
Debevec, Paul
}, year = {
2003
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association
}, ISSN = {
1811-864X
}, ISBN = {
3-905673-08-8
}, DOI = {
/10.2312/VAST/VAST03/041-050
} }
Citation