A puzzle in 4D digital preservation and reconstruction of an Egyptian palace

`A puzzle in 4D´ is a new project dealing with the general problem of integration of heterogeneous and incomplete digital and non-digital records of archaeological long-term excavations to prepare them for spatio-temporal analysis, long-term archiving based on national and international standards and open-access online publication for specialists and the general public. Our a pilot study will be the resources from the Austrian excavation project at Tell el Daba (TED) in Egypt, where fieldwork has taken place since 1966. During this time, the archaeological discipline has seen major changes. Most notably developments in information technology have caused a shift from analogue to digitally-born data. As a result, the TED archive at the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology OREA contains a huge and heterogeneous resource of digital and non-digital documents, photographs, plans and drawings. In this paper we will present TED resources and the challenges of archiving and integrating them using a 4D Archaeological Information System (AIS) for digital spatial-temporal post-excavation analysis. We will outline the possibilities we think such a system will add to conventional (2D) methods of analysis.