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How much written content in Herculaneum do you expect this technique will reveal?

Do you expect your technique will apply to other ancient texts beyond just Herculaneum?

Ultimately, the sky is the limit with the Herculaneum collection. It will probably be a slow and steady build though. We are working to prove the methods on the real Herculaneum material, at which point we can start extending the method to more of the intact scrolls. The segmentation and some other steps of the process still involve some manual work, so even once the concept is proven we will want to further automate those steps. If this all goes well, it would be an incentive for those in charge of the archaeological site to further explore parts of the still-buried Villa and look for more scrolls from the library. But even of those already excavated, we are looking at on the order of hundreds of intact scrolls that contain many columns of text each and are currently entirely unseen.

The technique definitely applies to other artifacts! The core pipeline we call Virtual Unwrapping and has been used to successfully reveal some ancient texts[1]. The primary challenge in this post is addressing the "carbon ink problem" specifically, where the ink looks identical in density to the uninked papyrus. But some artifacts make it easier, for example they are written with iron gall ink which shows up quite clearly in X-ray CT.

[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/9/e1601247.full

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