A puzzle in 4D Digital preservation and reconstruction of an Egyptian palace Edeltraud Aspöck, Karin Kopetzky, Barbara Horejs, Manfred Bietak OREA Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) Vienna, Austria edeltraud.aspoeck@oeaw.ac.at Matthias Kucera, Wolfgang Neubauer Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for archaeological prospection and virtual archeology (LBI ArchPro) Vienna, Austria matthias.kucera@archpro.lbg.ac.at Abstract—‘A puzzle in 4D’ is a new project dealing with the general problem of integration of heterogeneous and incomplete digital and non-digital records of archaeological long-term excavations to prepare them for spatio-temporal analysis, long- term archiving based on national and international standards and open-access online publication for specialists and the general public. Our a pilot study will be the resources from the Austrian excavation project at Tell el Daba (TED) in Egypt, where fieldwork has taken place since 1966. During this time, the archaeological discipline has seen major changes. Most notably developments in information technology have caused a shift from analogue to digitally-born data. As a result, the TED archive at the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology OREA contains a huge and heterogeneous resource of digital and non-digital documents, photographs, plans and drawings. In this paper we will present TED resources and the challenges of archiving and integrating them using a 4D Archaeological Information System (AIS) for digital spatial- temporal post-excavation analysis. We will outline the possibilities we think such a system will add to conventional (2D) methods of analysis. I. INTRODUCTION ‘A puzzle in 4D’ is a new project dealing with the general problem of integration of heterogeneous and incomplete digital and non-digital records of archaeological long-term excavations to prepare them for spatio-temporal analysis, long-term archiving based on national and international standards and open-access online publication for specialists and the general public. The pilot study will be based on the resources from the Austrian excavation project at Tell el Daba (TED) in Egypt, where altogether 88 fieldwork campaigns were carried out since 1966 (Fig.1). Tell el Daba (TED), the ancient Avaris, was the capital city of the Hyksos and is situated in the Nile delta region of Egypt and was occupied from the 12 th to the 18 th dynasty (early second millennium BC) [1]. Excavations of mainly residential buildings, tombs and temples show a wealthy society with contacts to many parts of the eastern Mediterranean including a unique connection to Minoan culture. Fig. 1 Tell el Daba excavation areas (after: Bietak et al., Ä&L 19 (2009), fig. 1). After 45 years of fieldwork campaigns, 1 the TED archive at OREA contains a huge and heterogeneous resource of digital and non-digital photographs, plans, drawings, written documentation and the archive of Minoan style wall painting fragments. Today, parts of the datasets and information on TED are destined to destruction. For example, the negatives of black and white photos from earlier fieldwork campaigns are deteriorating irreversibly over time. Data loss may occur due to fragmented legacy research data (e.g. digital site maps) and incompatibility of formats as well as loss of knowledge about the spatial and temporal relationships of archaeological entities. The two main aims of the project ‘A puzzle in 4D: digitisation and preservation of an Egyptian palace’ are: 1. Creation of an archive to ensure the preservation of analogue and digital TED resources including the digitization of analogue resources, enrichment with metadata for long-term archiving and open-access online publication. 2. Development of a tool for the integration of data according to their spatio-temporal relationship and for 4D post-excavation processing of excavation legacy data. 1 Due to the Egyptian-Israeli war work at the site was not possible from 1970‒1975.