Symposium TC3—Materials Issues in Art and Archaeology

The world’s cultural heritage is currently in more danger than ever in our current history. The significance of protecting these artifacts becomes more real with their imminent destruction worldwide, whether it be by natural deterioration or a casualty of war. Advancements in technology allow for these precious cultural entities to be protected and their technical construction better understood. We seek contributions of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that provides new insights into cultural heritage, archaeological, and art conservation materials. The preservation of the world’s cultural heritage includes studies of material and object degradation, stabilization, documentation, monitoring and conservation.

Materials research, when applied to cultural heritage, allows us to analyze and reconstruct the compositional and microstructural variability of significant objects and processes, to measure and gain understanding of special properties and performance characteristics. We discover artists’ processes, appreciate their special knowledge and sometimes find innovations, mistakes, corrections or the rate-limiting steps that bounded their practices. The focus of this symposium is: (1) exploring the advancements in imaging technologies as applied to art, archaeology and monumental structures, (2) the physical and chemical characterization of art objects and archaeological artifacts and their ranges of variability, (3) analysis and reconstruction of the technologies of selection, preparation, production, testing and performance by which materials are transformed into useful, significant and beautiful objects, (4) studies of the properties and performance of ancient objects and the processes underlying their deterioration, (5) the use of portable instrumentation for the characterization of ancient materials.