# Reconstruction and Visualization of the Mosaic Floor of the Temple of Pitiunt Hillfort
## 2 Materials and Methods  
The reconstruction of an antique mosaic is of great importance. The question of why some lost parts were reconstructed in this way has been the subject of many works dealing with different aspects. However, in the main, these works are either related to narrative reconstructions or to physical reconstructions [14; 15; 16; 17]. Our reconstruction will help to create a virtual 3D model of the temple and the whole complex. The temple complex of Pitiunt consists of the ruins of four temples that were built one after the other on a single site in the period of the 4 th to the 6 th century AD. The first three temples were built on top of each other, and the fourth one was moved to the west. The temple complex is now in ruins, and the outlines of the foundations are visible (Figure 1). According to most researchers, the earliest building of the complex--the single-nave Temple No. 1 with a semicircular apse--was built between the Edict of Milan in 313 and the First Ecupanical Council of Nicaae in 325. It was the residence of Bishop [PERSON] of Pitiunt. Temple No. 2, a three-nave, single-aisle Temple with a wide narthxe, was built on the site after the temple was destroyed by fire in the middle of the 4 th century. It was the richest of all the buildings in the complex. Its naves were separated from each other by marble columns, and the floors were decorated with mosaics. The temple did not last very long and was also destroyed by a fire, most probably in the 5 th century AD. At a later date, Temple No. 3 was built on its foundations. The new design of the stylobates, the apses and the barriers between the nave and the narthxe partially destroyed the mosaic. However, the remaining part decorates the floor of Temple No. 3. In a number of places on the naos, the lost mosaic has been replaced by ceramic tiles [7]. Our reconstruction of the mosaic floor of Temple No. 2 was based on the layout of the Bichvint mosaic floor shown in Figure 7A in Volume 3 of the monograph [3], the layout from the article by [PERSON] [12] based on the drawing by [PERSON] kept in the State Museum of Georgia and the layout of the remains of the mosaic floor from the Archaeological Museum of the Pitsunda State Historic and Architectural Reserve \"Great Pitiunt\" (hereinafter \"Pitsunda Archaeological Museum\"). The reconstruction of the mosaic floor of Temple No. 2 from the Pitiunt Fortress required a thorough analysis of the available layouts. This work revealed a number of errors and inconsistencies in the sources. The scaling of different variants of the layout gave different geometric dimensions, incompatible with one another and with the existing description. Therefore, it was decided to clarify the geometry of the complex using aerial photography from a UAV, building a photogrammetric model, orthophotomap and DTM according to an established algorithm for such sites [18]. This work made it possible to identify a number of features of the geometry of structures and verify the dimensions. Aerial photographs of the temple complex were taken using a Mavic Air 2S quadrocopter equipped with an 18-megapixel camera. The flight altitude was 10 m, the camera installation angle was 90 degrees to the horizon, the recording interval was 2 s and the flight speed was set on the basis of a 60-80% overlap of adjacent images. Several serpentine runs were made from west to east and back, with the trajectory being shifted northwards by 2-3 m per cycle. Agisoft Metashape Professional was used to process the UAV survey results. A photogrammetric model, an orthophotomap and a DTM of the preserved foundations of the Temples Nos. 2 and 3 were obtained. The results showed that, on average, the temples had a remarkable parallelogram shape of 4 degrees (Figure 2), which was not reflected in any of the primary plans obtained by the Bichvint survey, where they were all inscribed in a rectangular outline formed by the north, west and south walls. Linking the reconstructed mosaic to the actual layout of the buildings was therefore much more difficult.