Three-dimensional (3D) digitization has become a central methodological pillar in cultural heritage documentation, conservation support, and dissemination. Despite the maturity of image-based photogrammetry and active sensing technologies, real-world digitization campaigns frequently diverge from idealized workflows due to constraints related to object accessibility, surface properties, lighting conditions, and operational feasibility. As a result, practitioners are often required to adapt acquisition and processing strategies dynamically, balancing geometric fidelity, visual quality, and practical limitations. This study presents a practice-oriented analysis of applied digitization workflows conducted in controlled indoor and museum environments, focusing on fragile and optically challenging cultural and paleontological objects. Structured light scanning, DSLR-based photogrammetry, and hybrid approaches were systematically explored. While structured light scanning offered high nominal resolution, its performance proved sensitive to material properties and surface behavior, leading to incomplete or unstable reconstructions in several cases. Photogrammetric workflows, when supported by controlled acquisition setups, yielded robust and visually coherent results for the majority of objects. For cases where conventional photogrammetry underperformed, alternative AI-assisted image-based reconstruction pipelines were evaluated as complementary solutions. Rather than emphasizing only successful outcomes, the paper documents recurring failure modes, decision-making trade-offs, and breakdown points across acquisition, alignment, meshing, and texturing stages. Empirical observations are synthesized into qualitative comparisons and decision-support tables, highlighting the conditions under which specific digitization strategies succeed or fail. The findings underscore that hybrid workflows, while theoretically advantageous, can amplify integration complexity and error propagation if not carefully constrained. By foregrounding practical constraints and adaptive methodological choices, this work contributes a transparent, experience-driven perspective on cultural heritage digitization, supporting more resilient planning and informed decision-making in future documentation and conservation projects.

Degradation of coastal environments is an issue that many areas in Europe are facing. In the present work, an ancient coastal lake wetland is investigated, the so-called Lake Lerna in NE Peloponnese, Greece. The area hosted early agricultural populations of modern Greece that started modifying their environment as early as the early–middle Neolithic. Two drill cores in the area of the ancient lake were analysed to establish the sedimentological succession and the depositional environments using sub-fossil assemblages (molluscs and ostracods). Three lithological and faunal units were recovered, the latter being confirmed by the statistical ordination method (non-metric multidimensional scaling). The usage of sub-fossil mollusc species for the first time in the region enriched the dataset and contributed significantly to the delimitation of the faunas. These consist of environments characterised by various levels of humidity (from stagnant waters to freshwater lake) and salinity, with ephemeral intrusions of salt water to the lake, documented by mollusc and ostracod populations. We conclude that the lake and its included fauna and flora were mostly affected by climatic fluctuations rather than human intervention in the area.

Thin sections are fundamental tools in mineralogy, petrography, archaeometry, paleontology, and heritage science, allowing for the microscopic study of mineral assemblages, rock textures, ceramic fabrics, and fossil microstructures. Although thin-section preparation is often presented as a standardized technical procedure, the quality and interpretative reliability of the final section depend strongly on material behavior, laboratory equipment, bonding and thinning procedures, thickness-control criteria, and operator decisions made during preparation. This paper examines thin-section preparation as a process of methodological calibration, understood as the material-specific adjustment of preparation decisions in order to preserve the microstructural features required for subsequent interpretation. The study combines an overview of current preparation practice with documented hands-on workflows from academic and heritage-oriented thin-section laboratories. Two case studies are used to develop the calibration framework. The first concerns silicified fossil wood and marly carbonate samples prepared at the Department of Geology, University of Patras, Greece, using water-cooled cutting, epoxy bonding under heat and pressure, machine-assisted and manual thinning, micrometer-based thickness monitoring, and optical assessment adapted to carbonate-rich samples. The second concerns archaeological ceramics, fossiliferous limestone, oolitic limestone, and coherent lithic/sedimentary samples prepared at the INSTAP Study Center for East Crete, Greece, where preparation decisions included mounting-face selection, cleaning, vacuum impregnation where required, controlled lapping, and transmitted/polarized-light quality assessment. Together, the case studies show that equivalent preparation stages require different operational decisions according to hardness, brittleness, porosity, cohesion, fossil content, ceramic fabric, and intended analytical purpose. Preparation-induced features such as microcracks, smearing, surface relief, detachment, or loss of weak fabrics may be misread as primary geological, technological, taphonomic, or conservation-related features if preparation choices are not properly considered. Framed in this way, thin-section preparation is positioned as a foundational first step in heritage material characterization, on which the reliability of subsequent optical, electron-optical, and microanalytical methods directly depends.