A cultural heritage partonomy for the documentation of 3D digital artefacts of Cypriot coroplastic art

The goal of this paper is defining a Cultural Heritage Artefact Partonomy (CHAP) concerning coroplastic Cypriot art. In particular, two case studies have been considered: the terracotta statues from the port of Salamis, attributed to the Neo-Cypriote style (ca. 600-500 BC), and the small clay statuettes from the Ayia Irini sanctuary, mostly attributed to the Cypro-Archaic period (700-500 BC). Although their differences in size, style and decorations, the items of this study represent male standing bearded figures, sometimes holding animals, arms or music instruments, and provide interesting examples for the description of human figures and their attributes in ancient times. Moreover, 3D digital models have been created digitising the physical artefacts for archaeological purposes.
The objective of this work is framed within the EU GRAVITATE project, which proposes an innovative approach to the study of heritage artefacts, including 3D virtual reconstruction, classification and morphological analysis, steps that are limited by the impossibility to re-unite them physically, either because they are stored in various museums or because physical refitting fails. In this perspective, a controlled vocabulary for the documentation and retrieval of 3D digital fragments and their parts has been developed and proposed here.
CHAP is a SKOS vocabulary, aligned and mapped to CIDOC CRM to integrate the description of the relationships between the parts and the overall context of the two archaeological collections. Focussing on both the artefacts and their digital counterparts, CHAP refers also to the CIDOC-CRMdig extension, where possible missing components have been identified and undertaken.