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Cl PA 2003 XIX 11 ' International Symposium, 30 September - 04 October, 2003, Antalya, Turkey 
cal deposit. Together with RIEGL LMS GmbH 
(www.riegl.com) the excavation campaign 2002 at 
Schwarzenbach could be monitored for two weeks using 
the RIEGL LMS-Z360 and LMS-Z210 devices. The scan 
ners were used for a high resolution 3D recording of the 
surface of the open 900 m 2 trench, so far done using a 
total station. 
The primary data of a ‘scan’ is mainly a so-called ‘point- 
cloud’ in the sensor’s local coordinate system. In general 
it will be necessary to obtain multiple ‘scans’ from different 
positions to overcome the problem of occlusions that will 
be present in any scan from a single point of view. In order 
to obtain a quite complete representation of the surface by 
a point cloud, in general numerous scans have to be 
merged into a common coordinate system (“registration”). 
For the registration of the scans 11 reflectors were 
mounted on fixed positions. Right after the digging out of a 
single deposit, the surface of the trench or parts of it were 
scanned, using the highest resolution of the specific in 
strument. The collected and registred point clouds were 
resampled on a 5 or 10 cm regular grid and converted into 
a native ArcView shape-format. 
For further data processing we used the function of the 
GIS ArcView. The single surface of a deposit was clipped 
from the triangulated topographic scan data using the out 
bound polygon of the stratification unit, measured with the 
total station. Rectified digital photographs were mapped 
on top of the triangulated surface (Figure 6). The 3D laser 
scan devices showed a high reliability and efficiency for 
topographic single surface recording in every day archaeo 
logical work. The scanner, as used here, could do the same 
recording job, done so far by two people, in only 20% of 
time collecting up to 50 times more data. This would save 
at a typical 1 month excavation up to 100 man hours. The 
3D laser scanner can be seen as a future standard tool for 
the high resolution 3D recording of single surfaces on a 
stratigraphic excavation. 
8. REFERENCES 
Harris, E.C., 1989. Principles of archaeological stratigraphy. 
London, 2nd edition. 
Harris, E.C., 2001. The only way to see. In: Workshop 
Computer and Archaeology, Vienna.