A virtual reconstruction of the sun temple of Niuserra: from scans to BIM
Angela Bosco, Andrea D'Andrea, Massimiliano Nuzzolo, Rosanna Pirelli, Patrizia Zanfagna
Abstract In 2010 an Italian team started new investigations in the Sun Temple of Niuserra at Abu Ghurab, south of Cairo, Egypt. The archaeological survey of the site was planned in order to re-examine the temple more than one hundred years on from the discovery by German archaeologist L. Borchardt in 1898. The investigations is mainly aimed at a general re-evaluation of the archaeological data still available on the site in order to establish a new plan of the temple by means of laser scanner and photogrammetry. The sun temple of Niuserra, sixth ruler of the fifth dynasty (about 2400 BC), covers an area of about 8800 sq m. More than 130 scans of the temple have been acquired so far. Some parts of the area have also been rendered by un-calibrate photogrammetry. At the beginning of the project a Zoller and Froilich Imager 5003 was used, while in 2014 the scans were acquired by Faro Focus 3D X130. In the last campaign also an image-based technique was tested. All data have been aligned and merged. The model has been referenced, firstly according to a local grid and then geo-referenced. In order to check the hypothesis made by Borchardt, the digital replica of the still visible rests of the monument have been processed by BIM (Build Information Modelling), an approach currently underdeveloped in archaeology. Thanks to this new methodology, it is possible to produce categories of environmental and technological objects and sub-systems, which represent the 3D semantic of the acquired model. The paper deals with all the recent achievements and technological issue, especially as concerns the analysis of the orientation, sun positioning and wind. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the analysis of the bearing structure and its components.
