Sunken Featured Building
An archeological feature sometimes found when excavating sites around the Anglo-Saxon period is a sunken hollow, often with two or six post holes around the edges. These features are thought to be the remnants of a common style of building, named Sunken Featured Buildings (SFB). The current hypothesis is that the SFBs had planked floors over the sunken feature, rather than having a floor below ground level. This design is a convincing explanation of sites where charred planks were found underneath loom weights because it would imply that the floor had collapsed into the sunken feature while the building burned down, with the loom weights remaining on top.
Using the photogrammetry program ReCap Photo I could make a digital model of the reconstruction and learn more about how it was constructed. To make this model on Recap Photo, after a preliminary model has been generated by the computer, one must “fix up” the model, removing any defects, i.e holes, intersections, or just loose particles floating in space. Recap Photo scans the model for any of these suspected defects and provides you with an opportunity to to go through and edit any that you choose. This results in taking a detailed-oriented approach, and therefore gaining a more intimate knowledge of the object. Though this reconstruction was better than none, there were drawbacks to using a digital program. It was hard to get into the mindset of a worker from the Anglo-Saxon period because I simply wasn’t working with the materials they were. Furthermore, learning new programs always poses a challenge, and this was no exception. I ran into several technical difficulties over the course of making my model. However, the modeling did end up giving me a better understanding of both the construction of the thatched roof, as well as the walls and many other things, which would have been hard to notice had I not been paying close attention to them through my recreation.
