CIP A 2003 XIX"' International Symposium, 30 September- 04 October, 2003, Antalya, Turkey 
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3. THE TEMPLE OF NASIUM RECONSTITUTION 
PROJECT 
3.1 Context 
The project concerns the vestiges of a temple belonging to a 
former Roman city, Nasium, located in the east of France in the 
Meuse department (55) on the present territory of the Naix-aux- 
Forges and St.Amand-sur-Ornain towns. This city was founded 
presumably at the time where the Roman Empire marked its 
authority in the east of Gaul on one point of confluence of 
rivers and trade roads crossings. Archaeological excavations 
campaigns lasted several decades and permitted the collection 
of a great number of artifacts and various architectural element 
fragments. Therefore an important archaeological 
documentation has been provided to the MAP-CRAI. It seemed 
appropriate to do a preliminary study, centered on the 
exploitation of this information. Therefore the first part of this 
work was the establishment of a database, while the second part 
consisted in the archaeological data analysis which led to the 
virtual 3D restitution of the Nasium temple. 
3.2 Realization of a database exploiting the archaeological 
sources 
3.2.1 Archaeological documents exploitations: 
The archaeological documents have been taken into account 
and analyzed with a data model constitution in mind. The target 
of this work corresponds to an operating system modelling of 
the information contained in these documents. 
Figure 1 : Analysis of the information models concepts. 
The objectives assigned to this database were multiple: 
- To recover some data within the stored archaeological docu 
ments, 
- To inventory, to decompose and to structure their information, 
to allow for later exploitation, 
- To allow relational query of information according to 
selection criteria. 
The system we choose for the development was a RDBMS 
(Relational Database Management System, software 4D). 
The exploitation of the knowledge extracted from the 
archaeological documents as well as the exploitation of the 
information useful for the architectural 3D reconstitution of the 
site have generated great scientific development of the existing 
archaeological work. 
3.2.2 Database realization: 
The strategy of data capture is made of two steps: documents 
models, and then data models, connected to the information 
models. 
The data relational structure construction took naturally place at 
the time of the data capture : entry forms allowed to capture 
directly, one by one, every data, then links between them 
(called relations keys). 
The formulation of relatively complex information search 
engines required a programming step with the software 4D. The 
formulated queries look like this: 
- "In what documents does the fragment n°X appear? » 
- "Find all fragments of the frieze" 
Scientific rigor asked for the introduction of a hypothesis 
factor : the notion of belonging of an element to a set of 
elements. 
3.3 Archaeological data analysis 
3.3.1 Sculpted fragments photographic analysis: 
Photographic views of the various fragments discovered on the 
site, done at the “Maison des fouilles” of St.-Amand-sur-Ornain 
and at the Bar-Le-Duc Museum, allowed us to acquire 
knowledge about the architectural elements constituting the 
temple et to suggest a classification. 
3.3.2 The laser scanning: 
A complete laser scanning of the column drums fragments by 
3D point clouds helped us to determine the exact diameter of a 
temple column. The output showed a diameter of 0,613 m for 
its reeded part, and 0,58 m for its fluted part which turned out 
to be the exact value of a roman foot in this area of the Gaul. 
A dentil was also measured in order to verify major hypotheses 
about the building’s general shape.