Last week saw Wessex Archaeology's Edinburgh Office play host to FARO, a manufacturer of specialist scanning devices.
The FARO team demonstrated their cutting-edge laser scanner and their scanning arm, to our surveyors. The image below is the result of a scan taken from a single location, it shows the northern façade of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh with our office visible next door (right hand side). The latest model of scanner is able to capture data hundreds of metres away.
The team then went on to show the power of the FARO arm for capturing extremely small details (image right), in this case the fine impressions on the face of a tiny medieval penny found during recent fieldwork in Scotland by Wessex Archaeology.
It is clear that laser scanning is becoming an even more powerful and practical tool for archaeological survey.