Squaring the circle. Social and environmental implications of pre-pottery neolithic building technology at Tell Qarassa (South Syria)

We present the results of the microstratigraphic, phytolith and wood charcoal study of the remains of a 10.5 ka roof. The roof is part of a building excavated at Tell Qarassa (South Syria), assigned to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (PPNB). The Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) period in the Levant coincides with the emergence of farming. This fundamental change in subsistence strategy implied the shift from mobile to settled aggregated life, and from tents and huts to hard buildings. As settled life spread across the Levant, a generalised transition from round to square buildings occurred, that is a trademark of the PPNB period. The study of these buildings is fundamental for the understanding of the ever-stronger reciprocal socio-ecological relationship humans developed with the local environment since the introduction of sedentism and domestication. Descriptions of buildings in PPN archaeological contexts are usually restricted to the macroscopic observation of wooden elements (posts and beams) and mineral components (daub, plaster and stone elements). Reconstructions of microscopic and organic components are frequently based on ethnographic analogy. The direct study of macroscopic and microscopic, organic and mineral, building components performed at Tell Qarassa provides new insights on building conception, maintenance, use and destruction. These elements reflect new emerging paradigms in the relationship between Neolithic societies and the environment. A square building was possibly covered here with a radial roof, providing a glance into a topologic shift in the conception and understanding of volumes, from round-based to square-based geometries. Macroscopic and microscopic roof components indicate buildings were conceived for year-round residence rather than seasonal mobility. This implied performing maintenance and restoration of partially damaged buildings, as well as their adaptation to seasonal variability

A Featureless Approach to 3D Polyhedral Building Modeling from Aerial Images

This paper presents a model-based approach for reconstructing 3D polyhedral building models from aerial images. The proposed approach exploits some geometric and photometric properties resulting from the perspective projection of planar structures. Data are provided by calibrated aerial images. The novelty of the approach lies in its featurelessness and in its use of direct optimization based on image rawbrightness. The proposed framework avoids feature extraction and matching. The 3D polyhedral model is directly estimated by optimizing an objective function that combines an image-based dissimilarity measure and a gradient score over several aerial images. The optimization process is carried out by the Differential Evolution algorithm. The proposed approach is intended to provide more accurate 3D reconstruction than feature-based approaches. Fast 3D model rectification and updating can take advantage of the proposed method. Several results and evaluations of performance from real and synthetic images show the feasibility and robustness of the proposed approach.