Articles by Alban-Brice Pimpaud

It has been over twenty years since the ICAR database of figurative scenes from pre-Roman Italy (Etruscan, Italic, Italiote) was first made available online to researchers, students and the general public (http://icar.huma-num.fr/, 2002-, ISSN 2491-2301). The database is a tool for documentation and research into ancient iconography, bringing together the major corpora of images from pre-Roman Italy and providing the main information (archaeological, historical, stylistic, discovery, conservation, bibliographical) relating to them. Since 2000, ICAR has been developing its activities in association with various iconographic research programmes. Over the last ten years the database has also taken into account the modern documentation of the ancient artefacts and offers a data interoperability portal bringing together all the international collections preserving modern reproductions of Etruscan painting. Within this framework, we developed an exploratory tool (ICAR 4D) to combine high-definition 3D digitizations of two Etruscan painted tombs (the tombs of the Bigas and of Orcus in Tarquinia) with all the drawings and paintings produced over more than a century since the discovery of the two monuments. This tool uses cross-browser and open-source libraries to digitally expose and allow 3-D real-time online examination of both tombs’ models and their rich graphical documentation.

In cooperation with the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, the GIS Center of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt has undertaken the creation of an archaeological map of the West Bank of Thebes in order to supply the Egyptian authorities with a tool for the management and the development of this rich archaeological area. The relevant documentation for the mapping process, because of its abundance and disparity, requires the establishment of a unified documentation system using jointly GIS and databases. Besides the production of thematic maps, this tool opens new horizons, both in terms of processing and analysis and in terms of sharing and publication of data relevant to the knowledge of the cultural heritage of Thebes.