Sectors

Nearing completion, the PRESIOUS project is creating software that will help speed up the work of archaeologists around the world. The software will scan artifacts and help build a 3D model into the computer, helping archaeologists fill in the missing pieces.

The PRESIOUS project, funded by the European Union, cost $3.9 million and 3 years to come to fruition, which will happen later this month. The software created by the project has three tools, as described by Archeology Magazine. The first simulates how stone erodes in specific conditions, the second helps archaeologists fit pieces of broken artifacts together, and the third helps predict how such artifacts with missing pieces could have looked.

Once completed, the software will be free and available for archaeologists to download to help with their own projects. Professor Theoharis Theoharis, project coordinator spoke about the free release in the European Commission's Community Research and Development Information Service press release.

'We did discuss the possibility of commercialising our software, but the academic project partners understood that our end users - archaeologists - work under harsh funding constraints. So these tools will go live free once the project ends (in January 2016). In addition, we have a great deal of data and research results that we intend to make available online. There were many related cultural heritage issues that we would have liked to tackle, so we hope that by making this information available, the research work will continue."

Typically the usual work of an archaeologist is to find tiny fragments of a broken artifact in the field and then try to put together the pieces in the lab. Already time-consuming, the next step, in today's archaeology field, is to digitize the artifact so that others may be able to analyze it without damaging the original in any way.

As Popular Science pointed out, getting this jigsaw of an artifact into the computer is not as simple as taking a picture of it. The researchers have to input wide varieties of data - the shape, size, material, and construction. The usual process takes hours and costs archaeology programs money in overtime, which usually don't have the funds for such work.  

Hopefully, with PRESIOUS' software at the disposal of archaeologists worldwide coupled along with the ability to then share their findings, the PRESIOUS project could be the start of a new wave of archaeology. When researchers can make their work more efficient and are able to share it with scientific precision, it is possible more connections can be made between the various historic cultures than ever before.