My very own photogrammetric revolution

Lately, I have spent so many hours in front of my computer that I have no such thing as free time anymore and I hardly know what is happening outside, especially, as this sitting in front of the computer can only be done after my regular work at the Museum of Åland. My obsession is connected to photogrammetry 🙂 As I have written here before, during the excavations at the longhouse site in Kvarnbo, we chose photogrammetry as a main documentation method and totally skipped time-consuming hand-drawn recording (yep! totally!). Photogrammetry is a process that produces spatially accurate images from ordinary 2D photographs – with these images being georectified one can produce photographic plans of the site or a feature and its stratigraphy and one can take accurate measurements directly from the photo. And, the 3D models created from the same photographs create a visually very rich final product that you can go back to again and again. As there were quite a lot of features discovered and I am pretty new to the method, you can imagine that much of the time is spent just testing around, but the more time I spend to this, the more I am convinced that photogrammetry is the thing for future fieldwork. Especially, as it is also a very good basis for creating the usual site plans and feature drawings. The models created have been exported to ArcGIS platform for digitalization done from the photogrammetry and – Voilà! – the plan or a section drawing as you are used to see in archaeology is there as well! With one major improvement = you can always go back to the uninterpreted view.