Impressed by the technology

 

Let's go back in history for a moment;  in 79 A.D., the massive Plinian eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy -- so named because Pliny the Younger described it and Pliny the Elder, the younger's uncle, perished in it -- buried Pompeii in ash and buried Herculaneum under a pyroclastic flow.  This resulted in the remarkable preservation of homes and other buildings in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and as noted, even the various fates of the unfortunate victims have been determined by their skeletal remains and even casts of the shape that was left in the ash that buried them.

Until very recently (last month), one thing that I didn't know about at all was the Herculaneum scrolls, also called the Herculaneum papyri.  From the article that I'm going to link to, here's the description of what they are:

"According to Smithsonian Magazine, “In the 18th century, workmen employed by King Charles III of Spain, then in charge of much of southern Italy, discovered the remains of a magnificent villa, thought to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (known as Piso), a wealthy statesman and the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. The luxurious residence had elaborate gardens surrounded by colonnaded walkways and was filled with beautiful mosaics, frescoes, and sculptures. And in what was to become one of the most frustrating archaeological discoveries ever, the workmen also found approximately 2,000 papyrus scrolls.”

Why is it frustrating? Because the intense heat of the pyroclastic flow cooked them better than a burnt steak.  But though they look like what bad boys and girls get in their Christmas stocking, there's still writing on them. That writing could be read, if there was a way to unroll the scrolls without turning them into a pile of little black burned papyrus fragments. 

Here's what both the wrapped and unwrapped scrolls look like.

This is where the the impressive technology comes in.

Unwrapping The Herculaneum Papyri With Infrared, Imaging, And AI

I can't excerpt everything that's in this article, so you'll have to read it, if you are so inclined.  But to summarize, this impressive technology has been successful.  The excerpt below describes why this is just a first step, and given what's said below, one might wonder if money at the level being discussed might potentially be better spent on something that's more societally concerning, such as climate change.

But archaeologists are people too, with jobs, and it's OK for them to be employed.

"According to the Vesuvius Challenge, two key technical problems need to be solved: segmentation at scale and scanning at scale. “The current bottleneck is tracing the papyrus surface inside the scan of the scroll,” Vesuvius Challenge writes. “Currently, we use manual tracing aided by various algorithms. This is quite expensive – about $100 per square centimeter. We spent about $200,000 so far to trace enough material to read the fifteen partial columns of text that were revealed in 2023.”

The Herculaneum scrolls present a significant challenge due to their size and the costs associated with unrolling them. Full scrolls measure between 10 to 20 centimeters in width and can reach lengths of up to 15 meters. Current techniques for unrolling these scrolls are prohibitively expensive, costing between $1 to $5 million per scroll.

With approximately 300 scrolls to decipher, the total cost could easily exceed hundreds of millions. Additionally, some sections of the scrolls are so compressed that current methods cannot unroll them at all."

But that's not all!

"The second challenge – scanning at scale – needs to be met because “each scan currently requires the use of a particle accelerator in England and conservator-supervised transportation of the scrolls two at a time from Naples in custom-made 3D-printed cases. This costs about $40k/scroll with current techniques and is also subject to the availability of beam time,” writes the Vesuvius Challenge. “The total cost to scan all 300 scrolls could be $30M with current techniques (at current prices).” "

So it is indeed impressive technology, and clearly one of the challenges is significantly reducing the costs. But a lot of people love a challenge.