There are numerous applications in archaeology for the non-contact, non-invasive scanning technology of PhotoModeler Scanner.
Some possible applications are modeling artifacts, terrain or structures in-situ in dig sites, extracting the 3D surface of cave paintings, petroglyphs or carvings, and modeling objects for curatorial purposes.
Cave Paintings
These paintings in the Ekain Cave, Basque Country (Spain) are
from the Magdalenian Period. They are some of the most beautiful horse
cave paintings in the Franco-Cantabrian art.
The paintings are 12,500 years old and are located in different
galleries within the cave. The Ekain cave, in July 2008, was added as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Six PhotoModeler Scanner projects were created of two parts of the Zaldei gallery to evaluate the possibilities with PhotoModeler
Scanner. The screen shot here is of one of those projects.
The projects consist of one or two photo pairs, each taken with a Nikon D70s with 27mm focal length lens.
The projects were exported (including textures) from PhotoModeler Scanner and then imported into Cinema 4D to make final adjustments to the model & textures and for
rendering.
This project and video were created by Jan Wesbuer. The resulting models have close to one million triangles, and seven 2048 by 2048 texture images together.
The four frames of a video shown on the right are from the full-length movie. View the 5MB Flash video, or right click, save and play the original 22MB QuickTime mov file.
Peristyle Hall, Mahram Bilqis, Yemen
Mahram Bilqis, the Moon Temple, which was probably constructed in the eighth century B.C., has been described as one of the archaeological wonders of the world. It is located in Marib, Yemen, at the interface between the deserts of eastern Yemen and the mountains of central Yemen. In 1951-2 its Peristyle Hall was first excavated by Wendell Phillips, founder and President of the American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM), in a pioneering project of South Arabian archaeology. Over the following years blowing sand refilled the trenches and by the 1970s the site again appeared unexcavated. In 1998 the AFSM, under the leadership of its President Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, returned to Mahram Bilqis and began to reexcavate and record the Peristyle Hall as a prelude to excavating the interior of the temple itself. The excavation of the Peristyle Hall is now complete and excavation within the temple has begun. Further information on the excavation of the Peristyle Hall can be found in this article.
The PhotoModeler Scanner project is of the west wall of the Peristyle Hall.
The wall is 19 meters long and 2.8 meters high. The photos used for the
PhotoModeler Scanner project were taken using a Canon Digital Rebel with a
20 mm lens in the spring of 2006. Some of the targets used for photo
referencing were shot in with a reflectorless total station to provide
control points to reference the PhotoModeler project to the site coordinate
system. The animation above was rendered in 3D Studio Max from a PhotoModeler Scanner export. The project was executed by Bill Isenberger.
Animal Skull Scan
A skull from a mammal bone collection.
It is the skull of canis familiaris.
This project was created by Jan Wesbuer. It has 16 photos and 8 point clouds. The resulting model has 21,000 3D points.
This image is a screen shot of PhotoModeler Scanner showing a textured 3D point cloud, a 3D textured surface model and 2 of the 16 photos.
This animation of the textured point cloud was created and exported entirely by PhotoModeler Scanner. [Note that in this animation only 3D points are rendered (as small solid-colored discs) and no surfaces appear - hence the sparkle look.]
Six PhotoModeler Scanner projects were created of two parts of the Zaldei gallery to evaluate the possibilities with PhotoModeler
Scanner. The screen shot here is of one of those projects. 
This project and video were created by 
Mahram Bilqis, the Moon Temple, which was probably constructed in the eighth century B.C., has been described as one of the archaeological wonders of the world. It is located in Marib, Yemen, at the interface between the deserts of eastern Yemen and the mountains of central Yemen. In 1951-2 its Peristyle Hall was first excavated by Wendell Phillips, founder and President of the 
This project was created by 
This animation of the textured point cloud was created and exported entirely by PhotoModeler Scanner. [Note that in this animation only 3D points are rendered (as small solid-colored discs) and no surfaces appear - hence the sparkle look.] 
