Images and Artefacts of the Ancient World

Scientific and technical leaps forward in recent years have introduced a new dimension into the study of objects from the ancient world. In 2000 a discussion meeting was held at the Royal Society in London with the aim of debating the potential of this 'image enhancement' among archaeologists, historians and scientists.

These fifteen papers explore the ways in which recent developments in imaging, image analysis, and image display and diffusion can be applied to objects of material culture in order to enhance historians'' understanding of the period from which the objects came (in this case, the remote past). In interpreting artefacts, the historian acts out a perceptual-cognitive task of transforming often noisy and impoverished signals into semantically rich symbols that have to be set within a cultural and historical context. Engineering scientists, equipped with a range of sophisticated techniques, equipment and highly specialised knowledge, are not always as aware as they might be of the range and the exact nature of problems faced by historians in interpreting objects of material culture. By providing the opportunity for scholars from these communities to explain to each other what they are doing and how, the papers explore the ways in which the scientific contributors and the historians are thinking about subjectivity of interpretation, visual cognition, and the need to improve methods of presenting evidence so as to feed directly back into their own scientific thinking and to encourage genuine innovation in their approach to developing methods of image-enhancement and interpretation of objects. A significant further dimension is the improvement of techniques of providing high quality images of important and valuable collections of original artefacts to scholars who cannot always study the originals directly. Another important development discussed here is the fact that such imaging techniques now offer the researcher valuable insurance against the processes of deterioration to which such artefacts are inevitably subject. Seven of the papers are scientific and technical, while the other eight have an archaeological or historical focus.