Restoring a Warrior

Dorothy King beat me to the punch on this one (as many people do) … Some engineering types from the University of Warwick teamed up with some archaeologist types from the University of Southampton and the Herculaneum Conservation Project to digitally ‘restore’ a head from Herculaneum which is believed to depict a fallen Amazon warrior. Here’s the original:

Mark Williams (one of the WMG scientists) dixit:

“The statue is an incredible find. Although its age alone makes it valuable, it is unique because it has retained the original painted surface, preserved under the volcanic material that buried Herculaneum.”

Graeme Earl (archaeological computing from USouthampton) dixit:

“Cutting edge techniques are vital to the recording of cultural heritage material, since so much remains unstudied or too fragile to analyse. Our work at Southampton attempts to bridge the gap between computing and archaeology in bringing the best that colleagues in engineering have to offer to unique artefacts from our past.”

The cynics among us are probably not so impressed by computer recreations any more (and I tire of reading about CATscanned mummies too), but this project is going a step further:

In the final step Professor Alan Chalmers, head of WMG’s visualisation team and an expert in ultra-realistic graphics, will apply techniques to the computer model to exactly reproduce the lighting and environmental conditions under which the painted statue would have originally been created and displayed. This visualisation will provide archaeologists with an otherwise impossible view of how the original statue may have looked in context, and allow them to experiment with alternative hypotheses.

I’d be interested to know whether the object was painted once and allowed to fade or whether it was repeatedly repainted …