Scanning is essential to this study season. Today I completed all the scanning of the church and everything west, north, and south of it. The House of Tyche is the final scanning project.

In addition, this study season will open several probes. We opened the first today in Cardo 3 North, north of the apse and next to the blocked doorway in the west wall of the House of Tyche. We restricted our work today to the area south of a single line of limestone blocks that were part of a blockage of the small cardo when the complex was decommissioned. As these stones are floating, they will be removed.

Digging again will lead to more answers and possibly questions.

As I do more scanning — 108 scans so far — I marvel at the capability of the hardware while struggling with the challenges of the site. Heat continues to be a problem. If I scan in the early part of the day, I have harsh sun angles. If I scan later in the day, the heat can shut me down (the iPad actually) in about an half hour. I also wish I had worked more with the scanner in advance. To be effective in archaeology, the device needs an extendable pole for the tripod. These are just a few of the thing the field is teaching me.

Enjoy today’s scan of the structures southwest of the church…

Today, two projects were my focus. First of all, using my chart of walls, I went systematically through the site reviewing and noting the interrelationships of the walls. This work is essential as I build the final report on sequencing.

Secondly, and more visually exciting, I began the scanning of the church complex. Had a little trouble with heat shutting down the iPad, but I am quite happy with the result:

As one zooms in, the detail is quite excellent. The cloud still requires some cleaning and geo-referencing. But the initial product provides the hoped-for basic data..

I returned to Sussita to refine the scanning techniques. When dealing with large spaces, I am discovering that the scans must be closer together. The software could not auto-register the scans; but I was able to be much more successful manually. The results:

Back to the field tomorrow. This is exactly the kind of data I was hoping to gather.

Today, I did trial scanning in the field. I went up to Sussita early to avoid the harsh sunlight, but there were no protective clouds. The scanning was easy. But the iPad had trouble registering the third scan. I did a total of sixteen scans around the perimeter of the main excavation area and in major spaces.

Back at my room on the kibbutz, I loaded the scans onto the laptop and had the same problem with auto-registration. Above is the output of my first attempt at manual registration. The cloud is quite messy and not well aligned. So, I have read up more on registration and am working on a second attempt. Weekends are helpful.