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2. OBJECT DESCRIPTION 
The two gold quiver or “Gorythes” belongs to what is 
known as “Amazones’s gold”, a choice of prestigious 
objects illustrating one crucial moment of wandering 
Eurasian steppes people’s history (southern of the Ural, 
Kazakhstan, China), renewing the traditional forms of 
Scythes art. 
All the exposed objects came from regional Rostov and 
ethnographic Azov Museum in Russia. 
3. METHODOLOGY 
The digitalisation of these objects was carried out with 
the Minolta VI900 scanner. Combining digital 
photogrammetry and laser scanning allows to reach a 
high degree of efficiency. The high quality required for 
object documentation did not permit the unique use of 
digital photogrammetry and stereo matching. At that 
time, our measurements were carried out by digital 
photogrammetry, with restitution of digital surfaces 
models (DSM) and orthophotos at original scale. Time 
and infrastructures necessary to capture information 
and their edition was considerable and thus, did not 
allow to apply these techniques to secondary order 
objects. In fact, photogrammetry implies high value 
added work combined with strong matching algorithm 
for precise surface reconstruction. Even if there are 
systems that use feature extraction or image matching 
process, they are limited in precision for close-range 
surface editing. 
Figure 2: Digitalization was carried out by leaving the 
object while removing the principal protective glass. 
For that reason and combined with the constraints of 
not accessing the objects, it was decided to use a close 
range laser scanner able to reach sub- millimetre 
resolution. Then, a methodology of surface comparison 
was established for archeological and historical 
interpretation. The question was to determine wether or 
not these two gold quivers were hand-made or issued 
from a same mould. 
3.1 Data acquisition: 
Digitalisation is made by leaving the object while 
removing the principal protective glass and then start 
the survey with the laser scanner. The acquisition 
process is not affecting the quiver since the laser beam 
is not of sufficient energy to alter the object surface. 
Several measurement are made form different viewing 
angles in order to cover all the quiver. Each part were 
measured by seventeen to twenty scans with 320.000 
points each. 
Meanwhile the laser scanner acquisition, the system is 
able to take a picture stored as a textured photo, and 
then draped over the object for visualization purposes. 
These textures of high-resolution were acquired with a 
digital camera Sinar P, equipped with a numerical back 
PowerPhase FX which can reach up to 150 millions 
pixels by image. 
The reconstruction of this man made object is rather 
complex since its reduced dimension of nearly one 
meter, and also with the large amount of sculpted 
reliefs. Hence, It is necessary to use subsampling 
algorithms (reduce amounts of measurements) 
generated by these digitalizations and proceed to 
transformations on the regulated mathematical surfaces 
(TIN). This is done by filtering the scatter plot for 
removing noise and polluted measurements. Finally, 
we obtain a set of cloud points which need to be 
registrated. 
3.2 Global registration: 
A second step is to reference all the scans to build a 
complete object. This task was done with the 
commercial software Polygon Edit Tool from Minolta 
delivered with the scanner. The latter proceed to 
registration with morphological rules to combine 
different scans and thus, construct the entire object. 
Indeed, the quivers were measured with an accuracy 
close to an half-millimetre. If needed, some control 
points may be acquired to help the registration process 
and to reference one model to another. We chose to 
study the quivers matrice by matrice since a global 
curvature difference was noticed. Thus the registration 
process was fine tuned locally. 
Photographic images digitised in high resolution are 
then applied to the geometrical model for realization of 
photorealists models or 1/1 scale orthophotos