Using Geometric Modeling for Archiving and Searching 3D Archaeological Vessels

This paper presents a method for archiving and searching 3D Native American ceramic vessels using geometric modeling techniques. Archaeological vessels are scanned and defined as a set of three-dimensional triangulated meshes composed of points, edges and triangles. Our work includes modeling the data with parametric surfaces, extracting features to raise the level of abstraction of data, and organizing vessel data based on XML schema. A visual query interface on the Web was developed that permits users to sketch or select sample vessel shapes to augment text and metric search criteria to retrieve original and modeled data, and interactive 2D and 3D models.