Archaeology in the scanner

Southampton made the news last week with some of our scanning work. It turns out we have a massive room-sized scanner (misleadingly called a MICRO-CT scanner) at our imaging centre. It is capable of scanning stuff with a resolution of less than 0.1mm and given its size it can do this for quite big objects. Our Archaeological Computing Research Group could not wait to get their hands on this new toy, and collaborated with the British Museum to scan a large cauldron excavated at Chiseldon. The cauldron itself is actually not excavated since it is too fragile. Instead, the archaeologists lifted the big find encased in its soil matrix to preserve it until technologies come along that can tell us more about this fragile find. It seems that this time has now come! With this scanner the archaeologists were able to explore the cauldron by looking through the earth layers without excavating it.

Have a look at the video and read the article on the BBC website.

CT and animation of coin hoard

My colleagues Grant Cox and James Miles have been doing some amazing computerised magic with a coin hoard, and I thought it was time I wrote about their work. Both of them work with me at the Archaeological Computing Research Group at the University of Southampton. The Selby coin hoard consists of a bunch of coins still in their original container. The thing was submitted to a CT scan produced and processed by Richard Boardman and Mark Mavrogordato (mu-Vis CT centre). The results of this were then arranged into a sequence of animation by James Miles while Grant Cox made an accompanying animation in 3DS Max of coins raining down on the container. The video is now on show in the British Museum as part of the permanent Citi money exhibition. Worth a visit!