TRIUMPH ARCH IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE IN TYRE (LEBANON): A NEW APPROACH TO GIS ANALYSIS OF VERTICAL ELEMENTS IN 3D ENVIRONMENT

In recent years the GIS has been increasingly used as a fundamental survey and data management tool in multi-disciplinary fields. The GIS was originally designed for “environmental” use in territorial management while today it is more frequently used for analysis, cataloguing and modelling of sites considered to be of cultural, archaeological and architectural importance. Software which may be used to manage the territory as a whole must necessarily be applied even in the case of surveying, graphic rendering and management, through the relational databases, to all the aspects which characterize the cultural heritage, or are in any case related to the same. This innovative application is a field, which is currently being developed and has an enormous potential in the field of research. The study of the archaeological area of Tyre tends to define guidelines that produce an application methodology for the management of the spatial data of the archaeological elements, not only as views, as generally occurs, but also of elevation drawings. Perspective representations have up to now been completely ignored by the GIS, with the graphic elements processed exclusively by CAD. The aim of this research project is to produce a complete and detailed dynamic map on which the archaeological site may be represented realistically in three dimensions, by fully exploiting the interrogation potential of the vectorial data through the SQL language of the GIS. Surveys of archaeological structures performed with advanced tools such as the laser scanner, are in this case processed with the GIS, permitting in-depth analysis of their geometry, with respect to detailed information, recorded and catalogued in the RDBMS, and georeferencing the same to allocate the correct geographic information to the data. The project was developed on the Tyre (Lebanon) site and takes into account the archaeological area as a whole, focusing in particular on the Triumphal Arch. The AutoCAD vectorial map is reprocessed in full starting from a project in ArcMap where specific shapefile are created and the database is connected and structured, allocating the elevation details that make it possible to create 3D features, which may be imported to ArcScene, which is the 3D processing software of the ESRI. The polylines are transformed to polygons to permit areal processing and analysis of the single elements of the Arch, assembling all the descriptive data of each element in the table. Correct georeferencing is allocated in a system that may be used internationally, namely the UTM_WGS84, in this case in zone 36N, to ensure correct positioning even in 3D. The real potential of this research method is that it is now possible to analyze vectorial elements in perspective and as views, taking into account their correct geographic location with all the implementations offered by GIS intelligence, rather than simply working with reconstructions, views and 3D models.