Thursday, October 29, 2015

Talking mummies

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: Making the Mummies Talk (without Palmolive soap!) (Roberta Mazza, Faces and Voices Blog). Excerpt:
As it often happens in research, some good came as a result of what happened. Public concern raised by the Palmolive Indiana Jones YouTube exploits has pulled together a multidisciplinary team of specialists lead by Melissa Terrace (UCL) and Mike Toth (R.B. Toth Associates), including myself among others, that has received funds from Arcadia Foundation to investigate how special imaging techniques, such as multispectral technology, can lead to the establishment of non invasive methods for reading papyri encapsulated in mummy masks and other cartonnage objects. We named the project Making the Mummies Talk.
More on the Palmolive soap story is here (second link). Some related posts are collected here.

Non-invasive and non-destructive technologies are the way of the future. For non-invasive scanning of manuscripts, see here and links.