Digital Reunification of the Parthenon and its Sculptures

Abstract

The location, condition, and number of the Parthenon sculptures present a considerable challenge to archeologists and researchers studying this monument. Although the Parthenon proudly stands on the Athenian Acropolis after nearly 2,500 years, many of its sculptures have been damaged or lost. Since the end of the 18th century, its surviving sculptural decorations have been scattered to museums around the world. We propose a strategy for digitally capturing a large number of sculptures while minimizing impact on site and working under time and resource constraints. Our system employs a custom structured light scanner and adapted techniques for organizing, aligning and merging the data. In particular this paper details our effort to digitally record the Parthenon sculpture collection in the Basel Skulpturhalle museum, which exhibits plaster casts of most of the known existing pediments, metopes, and frieze. We demonstrate our results by virtually placing the scanned sculptures on the Parthenon.