  3D acquisition of archaeological artefacts has become an essential part of
cultural heritage research for preservation or restoration purpose. Statues, in
particular, have been at the center of many projects. In this paper, we
introduce a way to improve the understanding of acquired statues representing
real or imaginary creatures by registering a simple and pliable articulated
model to the raw point set data. Our approach performs a Forward And bacKward
Iterative Registration (FAKIR) which proceeds joint by joint, needing only a
few iterations to converge. We are thus able to detect the pose and elementary
anatomy of sculptures, with possibly non realistic body proportions. By
adapting our simple skeleton, our method can work on animals and imaginary
creatures.
