ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the development of automatic reconstruction systems capable of coping with the realities of real-world geometric puzzles that anthropologists and archaeologists face on a daily basis. Such systems must do more than find matching fragments and subsequently align them; these systems must be capable of simultaneously solving an unknown number of puzzles where all of the puzzle pieces are mixed together in an unorganized pile and each puzzle may be missing an unknown number of pieces. The chapter concentrates on the digitization process, algorithms for computational analysis and reconstruction that would be executed on the computational server. A sherd digitization station is a data-capture device that takes real-world sherds as input and generates a virtual three-dimensional model of the sherd surface geometry and appearance as output. A computational server for sherd analysis is a computer that will access the fragment database and provide quantitative analysis of the digitized sherds.
