'Virtual Archaeologist' Reconnects Fragments Of An Ancient Civilization
From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080815130417.htm
For several decades, archaeologists in Greece have been painstakingly attempting to reconstruct wall paintings that hold valuable clues to the ancient culture of Thera, an island civilization that was buried under volcanic ash more than 3,500 years ago.
This Herculean task -- more than a century of further work at the current rate -- soon may get much easier, thanks to an automated system developed by a team of Princeton University computer scientists working in collaboration with archaeologists in Greece.
The new technology "has the potential to change the way people do archaeology," according to David Dobkin, the Phillip Y. Goldman '86 Professor in Computer Science and dean of the faculty at Princeton.
Dobkin and fellow researchers report on their work in a paper to be presented Aug. 15 in Los Angeles at the Association of Computing Machinery's annual SIGGRAPH conference, widely considered the premier meeting in the field of computer graphics.
For several decades, archaeologists in Greece have been painstakingly attempting to reconstruct wall paintings that hold valuable clues to the ancient culture of Thera, an island civilization that was buried under volcanic ash more than 3,500 years ago.
This Herculean task -- more than a century of further work at the current rate -- soon may get much easier, thanks to an automated system developed by a team of Princeton University computer scientists working in collaboration with archaeologists in Greece.
The new technology "has the potential to change the way people do archaeology," according to David Dobkin, the Phillip Y. Goldman '86 Professor in Computer Science and dean of the faculty at Princeton.
Dobkin and fellow researchers report on their work in a paper to be presented Aug. 15 in Los Angeles at the Association of Computing Machinery's annual SIGGRAPH conference, widely considered the premier meeting in the field of computer graphics.