Establishing Best Practices for Photogrammetric Recording During Archaeological Fieldwork

Abstract

Archaeologists have recently embraced photogrammetry as a low-cost, efficient tool for recording archaeological artifacts, active excavation contexts, and architectural remains. However, no consensus has yet been reached about standard procedures for reliable and metrically accurate photogrammetric recording. The archaeological literature describes diverse equipment and approaches to photogrammetry. The purpose of this article is to open a discussion about when and how photogrammetry should be employed in archaeology in an effort to establish "best practices" for this new method. We focus on the integration of photogrammetry within a comprehensible research plan, the selection of equipment, the appropriate apportionment of labor and time on site, and a rubric for site photography that is conducive to successful and efficient modeling. We conclude that photogrammetric modeling will soon become an indispensable tool in most archaeological applications but should always be implemented in ways that do not place undue burdens on project personnel and budgets and that aid research goals in well-defined ways.

A method based on structure-from-motion photogrammetry to generate sub-millimetre-resolution digital elevation models for investigating rock breakdown features

“…Applications in geomorphology include laboratory flume experiments (Morgan et al, 2017), rockslides and landslides (Niethammer et al, 2012;Russell, 2016), eroding badlands (Smith and Vericat, 2015), fluvial morphology (Javernick et al, 2014;Dietrich, 2015;Bakker and Lane, 2016;Dietrich, 2016a, b), peatland microforms (Mercer and Westbrook, 2016), glacial process dynamics (Piermattei et al, 2016;Immerzeel et al, 2017), river restoration (Marteau et al, 2016), mapping coral reefs (Casella et al, 2016), beach surveying (Brunier et al, 2016), soil erosion (Snapir et al, 2014;Balaguer-Puig et al, 2017;Prosdocimi et al, 2017;Vinci et al, 2017;Heindel et al, 2018), volcanic terrains (James and Robson, 2012;Bretar et al, 2013;Carr et al, 2018), porosity of river bed material (Seitz et al, 2018), grain size estimation of gravel bed rivers (Pearson et al, 2017), and coastal erosion (James and Robson, 2012). In addition, SfM has also been widely used in archaeology for photogrammetric recording of small-scale rock art and artefacts and largescale archaeological sites (Sapirstein, 2016(Sapirstein, , 2018Sapirstein and Murray, 2017;Jalandoni et al, 2018).…”

SfM Photogrammetric Field Methods for Historic Burial Excavations: The Case of Bethel Cemetery

“…Additionally, this method was determined to be a more expedient method compared to hand-drawn maps of individual burials, thereby saving on time and financial resources. Other scholars have also found that 3D documentation methods are time efficient and more accurate (Douglass et al 2015;Koenig et al 2017;Novotny 2019;Olson et al 2013;Sapirstein and Murray 2017).…”

The Uronarti Regional Archaeological Project: Second Cataract fortresses and the Western Desert of Sudan

“…Select features were recorded in more detail using a combination of photogrammetry and topographic survey; aerial photographs were taken by a kite-mounted Olympus TG-4 camera alongside manual photography using the same camera. These 16-megapixel photographs were processed into three-dimensional models, digital elevation models and orthophotographic meshes with high metric accuracy (Sapirstein & Murray 2017). Spatial referencing was provided by ground control points recorded using Emlid Reach RS+ Real-Time-Kinematic Differential GPS units with a fixed base located at the URAP campsite and a rover collecting corrected data with sub-centimetre accuracy from a distance of up to 6km.…”