The Iron age Female Figures from Tranjordan

Abstract

In 2012, a successful networking of interdisciplinary interests led to the creation of a Franco-German project (Franco-German Figurines Project, FGFP) by an Old Testament scholar (Regine HUNZIKER-RODEWALD, Strasbourg), an archeologist of the ancient Near East (ASTRID NUNN, Wu-erzbourg) and a computational archeologist (Thomas GRAICHEN, Mayen-ce). The team, financed by the university of Strasbourg (more than two-thirds) and Wuerzbourg as well as private funds, began cataloguing during several Research stays the female terracotta figurines from Transjordan kept in mu-seums, storage facilities and university collections in Jordan, the United states and Canada. For the recording procedure the RTI (Reflectance Transformati-on Imaging) technique was chosen because it generates very dense surface data from the photographed objects and goes far beyond conventional digital photography in terms of output format versatility.