Geomatics and Archaeology: a never-ending History of collaboration. The case of Hung-E-Azhdar

Geomatics is the neologism used today to group all the disciplines and techniques useful to give back 3D metric information about any kind of physical objects. The need to know the shape and the dimensions of an object is always devoted to specific applications, which use the geometric information to develop interpretation of specific phenomena. Archaeology has been one of the first historical disciplines more interested in the use of Geomatics tools due to the importance that not only the 3D description of the objects but also their localisation during the excavation activities have during the archaeological understanding and interpretation processes. Until the 70’s of the last century, archaeologists used to manage by themselves measuring activities mainly based on the use of total stations; the continuous and rapid increasing of the Geomatics technologies forced to join the efforts by coupling archaeologists with surveyors in an interdisciplinary effort to reach the goals of the archaeological investigations. The IT developments influenced all the Geomatics techniques: land surveying has been enriched by satellite techniques, photogrammetry are now fully digital and in some cases also fully automatic, laser scanner based techniques and instruments has been developed both for land and built objects, GIS and BIM platforms are even more open solutions for geodatabases management. The common digital approach of all the Geomatics techniques allow a strict integration between the different technologies therefore a full and ever updated knowledge of the new possibilities of each technique is a mandatory requirement to obtain and manage metric data in a convenient way. Hung-e Azdhar archaeological investigations offer a complete view of the most advanced Geomatics applications managed by a multidisciplinary team formed by the Centro Scavi and the Politecnico di Torino experts .