Use wear as an archaeological landscape
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In 2014 in an unprecedented collaboration between the Capitoline Museum in Rome, Italy, and the University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology known as the Hidden Treasures of Rome project, 249 Roman black gloss pottery objects were provided for chemical and morphological study over the course of two years. During the Hidden Treasures of Rome: Capturing the Life Cycle of Roman Pottery project, Reflectance Transformation Images (RTI) were taken to enhance details on the objects not visible to the human eye, and undertook high-precision, high-resolution 3D scans of sixty-three objects, mostly plates and bowls, for more detailed analysis. This thesis asked the question whether treating use wear on black gloss Roman pottery as an archaeological landscape can aid in the identification and analysis of use wear. It also suggested that novel methods based on the use of blend modes and multiscale image fusion are superior to the use of profile and tangential curvature, and openness. A methodology using heterogeneous data and based on open source software was developed to reorient the 3D meshes, resect areas of use wear, convert them to a format suitable for import in QGIS, and to generate derived data based on the Relief Visualization Toolbox. It was demonstrated that treating use wear as an archaeological landscape and applying techniques of geomorphometrics and terrain analysis based on blend modes and image fusion using the Relief Visualization Toolbox enhanced and emphasized interior use wear on black gloss Roman pottery. Moreover, the method is general in nature and not restricted to vessel interiors nor to Roman pottery specifically. The method also demonstrated it is superior to previous methods based on profile and tangential curvature, and openness.
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M.A.