News
NooN Project Begins: Advancing Digital Heritage on Bornholm
5 Mar 2025
The NooN project, a pioneering effort to digitize and semantically document prehistoric artifacts, has officially launched on the island of Bornholm.
3D Scanning with Artec Spider II
Yiming Du performing 3D Scanning on a Sun Stone using Artec Spider II scanner | © Nicola Lercari
Bornholm, Denmark – March 5, 2025 – The NooN (Sun Stone Chronicles) project, a pioneering effort to digitize and semantically document prehistoric artifacts, has officially launched on the island of Bornholm. NooN is a cooperative research effort by the Bornholms Museum’s Archaeological Research Center, the Digital Archaeology Lab (DARKLab) at Lund University, and the Institute for Digital Cultural Heritage Studies at LMU Munich. The project is funded by the Beckett Foundation and brings together leading experts in archaeology and digital heritage.
The project is focusing on Sun Stones, small engraved prehistoric artifacts, which hold significant research interest due to their potential connections to early solar cults of ca. 2900 BC. By combining digital twins, obtained from high-resolution 3D scans, with a structured semantic database, the NooN project aims to revolutionize how these artifacts are studied, accessed, and preserved.
From the Institute’s side, Prof. Dr. Nicola Lercari and PhD Candidate Yiming Du are currently performing the 3D scanning of approximately 50 Sun Stones retrieved at the Vasagård site on Bornholm using a Artec Space Spider II 3D scanner. In parallel, Dr. Bruno Sartini is leading the development of a semantic database that will integrate detailed metadata from both the physical and digital artifacts, ensuring long-term accessibility and research potential. The provenience information of the semantic database is provided by the excavators and enriched by the additional effort of Dr. Finn Ole Sonne Nielsen, Dr. Nicolás Caretta, Master Student Josephine Bergman.
Our institute’s fieldwork followed an initial phase of digitization carried out by Ms. Bergman in February at DARKLab, under the leadership of Prof. Nicolò Dell’Unto.
This collaboration highlights the increasing role of digital methodologies in archaeology and heritage preservation. This approach ensures a new level of preservation for Sun Stones, producing 3D and semantic-structured data that can be accessed by scholars and the public.
For further updates, follow the Institute for Digital Cultural Heritage Studies’ official channels.