Cultural heritage and archaeology apply spatial intelligence to the past, running from capture through recovery to discovery. What distinguishes it is high-fidelity, metrically accurate, and usually non-contact reconstruction, coupled to a preservation imperative: the artifact may be fragile, fragmentary, or buried, and the digital record must be faithful enough to stand in for an object that cannot be handled or that no longer exists intact. Figure 14.3 organizes the field into three movements. Digitization captures artifacts and monuments in three dimensions, a lineage that runs from the landmark in-field laser scanning of the Digital Michelangelo Project [2986] through structure-from-motion photogrammetry [115] to the neural radiance fields [119] and 3D Gaussian splatting [121] now used for photorealistic heritage capture, all drawing on the reconstruction methods of Chapter 8. Virtual restoration uses geometric AI to reassemble what time has broken, posing fragment reassembly as a 3D puzzle over fractured parts, with large benchmarks such as Breaking Bad [2987] and the real fresco-reassembly dataset RePAIR [2988] driving the methods. Archaeological prospection discovers sites at landscape scale, most strikingly through airborne LiDAR whose bare-earth models reveal structures hidden under forest canopy, as in the canopy-penetrating surveys of the Maya lowlands at Caracol [2989] and across northern Guatemala [2990]. Organizations such as CyArk1 and the Factum Foundation,2 together with photogrammetry tools including Agisoft Metashape3 and the Open Heritage 3D archive,4 anchor the practical layer.
