Alongside the trenches and the finds, every excavation depends on a less visible kind of work: the constant effort to record, position, and reconstruct the site. At Falerii Novi, this task was undertaken by Sara Fabbri, Archaeology Survey Technician at the British School at Rome, who is responsible for the digital recording of all three excavation areas, coordinated by the BSR’s Geophysical Researcher Elena Pomar.
Her work begins with positioning: locating the excavation, and everything that emerges from it. This means not only the larger structures that come to light, but also the small finds – coins, bone pins, and other delicate objects- each fixed precisely to the point where it was recovered.
Much of this positioning happens from above. Using a drone, Fabbri produces orthophotos: zenithal images taken perpendicular to the ground, capturing the full extent of the structures and layers visible at a given moment.
These flights take place once or twice a week, timed to document a layer’s extent, dimensions, and position before they are removed. Yellow-and-black targets, their position recorded by GPS, are placed around the excavation, allowing the resulting orthophoto to be precisely georeferenced within the real world.
To record the BSR’s excavation, Sara also produces a full three-dimensional model, captured with the school’s Leica RTC360 laser scanner. Unlike the orthophotos, this method records more than just the tops of the walls: rotating 360 degrees and capturing a dense point cloud as it turns, the scanner records the full elevation of every wall, allowing for its reconstruction in three dimensions.
