Life

New tools preserve ancient treasures

Updated: 2013-06-17
By Cheng Yingqi ( China Daily )

"Traditionally, we made rubbings to record information on stone tablets. However, in some cases the writing on old tablets is indistinct," he said. "But laser scanners can help us read and see all the artwork."

The digitalization of historical sites and relics is not just about data. It helps recreate the society or community at that time, allowing scientists to look into the past and see the future.

One of the most interesting examples is the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, a collaboration between historians and information technology specialists at Stanford University.

Based on digitalized archaeological information, the model calculates the time, expenses of people traveling through the Roman Empire.

China's first international conference on excavation documentation was held in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province, in May. It attracted 105 archaeologists from home and abroad.

"Since Shaanxi is very rich in buried relics and artifacts, high-tech methods applied here helped us to improve the level of archaeological documentation," said Guo Xianzeng, deputy director of the provincial cultural heritage administration.

"The archaeological community in China is experiencing explosive growth in digitalizing," he said.

However, some archaeologists and scientists worry about data sustainability, a new problem brought by the updating technology. Just because data has been recorded it does not mean it is safe.

Julian D. Richards, director of the University of York's archaeology data service in Britain, said digital data are preserved in such a vulnerable way that archaeological records are now, ironically, at greater risk than leaving the data in the ground.

"In 1986, the BBC Domesday project, including some photographs and maps, stored the data on 30-cm laserdiscs on BBC microcomputers, the safest way they could think of," he said. "By 2006 the laserdiscs were obsolete, so they had to start rescue projects for the data."

Hartmut Mueller, a co-organizer of the conference in Shaanxi and professor at Mainz University of Applied Sciences' Institute for Spatial Information and Surveying Technology, in Germany, said: "Collecting data in different systems without sufficiently considering the aspects of interoperability is the daily practice all around the globe. Not only in archaeology, but in all fields related to spatial data acquisition, processing and storage."

In Europe and elsewhere, there are many projects on how to achieve interoperability between heterogeneous systems, Mueller said.

Lu, of Zhejiang University, said that although Chinese archaeologists are applying for more digital documentation technologies, information is actually collected by different institutions, with different standards and formats.

"Information sharing could be a problem," he said.

In the past, Chinese archaeologists and scientists applied new technologies to archaeological sites without common standards, so their job was more like a "scientific experiment", which makes it difficult to standardize the data format, he said.

"While technologies become mature, it is possible for archaeologists to find a way to unify the methods for data collecting and the format of their data," Lu said.

Su Bomin, a researcher at the Conservation Institute of Dunhuang Academy, said some Chinese archaeologists are already aware of the problem of data security that comes with new technology.

"Unified management of data needs a standard, and the formulation of such a standard needs different research institutions to take part.

"As we Chinese archaeologists are already aware of these problems, I believe a standard will be completed soon," he said.