(eerie music)
What does it mean to be lost to history?
The ancient Roman town of Herculaneum
essentially disappeared in the year 79 AD,
buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius,
destroyed by a pyroclastic surge of super hot gases
between 400 and 900 degrees Fahrenheit
moving nearly 200 miles per hour.
The searing heat boiled the blood,
and vaporized the flesh of its victims.
Burned all in its path, leaving behind a charred city
beneath layer upon layer of ash and volcanic debris.
But emerging new technologies push scientific boundaries
to recover and restore archeological artifacts.
Taken together, advances in X-ray imaging,
data science, and artificial intelligence
may soon delicately and digitally unravel history
and reveal ancient texts
dating a few years before the height of the Roman empire.
(dramatic music)
Computer scientist and University of Kentucky
professor Brent Seales is at the forefront of these efforts.
Augmented reality is supposed to be presenting you
with a view of your actual environment.
There's no question that in the world of ancient material,
this technology is gonna help us break through and read
materials that have never been read before.
Like the Herculaneum scrolls,
papyrus manuscripts flash fried by Vesuvius 2,000 years ago,
left carbonized and sealed shut.
Mysterious Roman time capsules
that currently drive the professor's curiosity.
They are the canonical example of material
from antiquity that is both too fragile to open,
and also so valuable and mysterious
that it has captured the attention
of scholars for many years.
Seales and his team
at the Digital Restoration Initiative,
part of the university's College of Engineering
have pioneered archeological applications
for technologies originally designed for medical study.
Specifically, micro-computed 3D tomography.
We're an imaginative people, right?
So we see that advance, and we say
now that I see how that works,
there are applications that maybe no one's thought of
that can cause breakthroughs in other areas,
and that imagination right,
and then that reapplication
is part and parcel of the innovative process.
And then how many slices do you have
to make up the whole run of the scroll?
I mean maybe 12,000? Right.
That's a lot of data, right?
And it's that imagination,
coupled with a surefire confidence in methodology,
which drives Seales to his most ambitious projects,
and ultimate successes.
Including the 2016 virtual unwrapping
of a third century Hebrew scroll
known as the Ein Gedi Scroll.
Using X-ray to peer inside the badly damaged
rolled up animal skin,
Seales and his team laid out
the artifact's geometric volume without ever opening it,
highlighting the text within.
(soothing music)
Now he's set his sights on the Herculaneum scrolls.
(gentle guitar music)
Back before the eruption, the Bay of Naples
offered a restful environment, just as it does now.
An ideal playground for the Roman elite and well-to-do.
(gentle guitar music)
California's Getty Villa is an architectural replica
of the Herculaneum Estate thought to be
the home of Caesar's father-in-law.
(gentle guitar music)
Kenneth Lapatin is the museum's curator of antiquities.
We know the Bay of Naples is where
Romans, senators, and later emperors left the city
in the heat of the summers
to much more pleasant climates in the south.
And in a way, I think it was
like the Hamptons in the United States.
(soothing music)
The nearby city of Pompeii
and its chilling body casts, death poses,
seemingly frozen in time
may haunt the public's mind.
But sitting at the base of Vesuvius,
the small town of Herculaneum
and the lavish estates surrounding it
were burned and buried as well.
(soothing music)
We know the wind was blowing south,
so the huge column of volcanic material
created an ash cloud, which was blown south
and the ash gently fell on Pompeii.
When that force of the volcano subsided
and the ash cloud dropped,
a very very hot, steamy, muddy volcanic gassy cloud
rolled down the hill at high speed
and burnt and buried Herculaneum
very differently than Pompeii,
burning and carbonizing
and thus preserving a lot of the finds.
So Herculaneum is smaller than Pompeii,
more deeply buried, and better preserved.
(metal tools clanging)
Largely forgotten, Herculaneum's ruins
were first discovered in the mid 18th Century
under 75 feet of compacted volcanic ash.
During the next 300 years, excavations started and stopped.
The town still lies mostly underground, and undisturbed.
One reason why what has been unearthed
is incredibly rare and treasured.
(soothing music)
And so the Getty Villa's 2019 summer exhibit,
Buried by Vesuvius, includes many priceless items
recovered from its ancient prototype.
Many on loan and transported out of Italy
for the first time ever.
Statues.
Frescoes.
And a few of those charred and scarred papyrus scrolls
by which the original site is now known, Villa de Papryi.
It's a small sample of an extraordinary find,
a library of some 1,800 relics.
There may be more as of yet un-excavated.
We understand that when they
first hit these papyrus scrolls,
they looked like charcoal briquettes.
No one knew what they were, and the story goes
that one of them was dropped and broke open,
and letters were found within, Greek writing,
and then they were recognized for what they are,
but they were carbonized and really frozen in a sense
by this volcanic debris,
so they can't just be easily unrolled.
Through the centuries, laborious efforts
to unfurl the fragile manuscripts often left scholars
an odd collection of puzzle pieces.
We could see a jigsaw puzzle in 3D,
because many of the fragments are also so-called
multi-layer fragments.
Fabrizio Diozzi leads the Department of Papyri
at the National Library of Naples,
holder of the vast majority of the scrolls.
The painstaking work to piece together the pieces
brought to light a library largely consisting of poetry
and epicurean philosophy detailing
the virtues of friendship and modest pleasures.
Writings never copied by Medieval and Muslim scribes,
and therefore hidden from scholarly interpretation.
(speaks foreign language)
It's a primary source.
We could say freshly thought, yeah?
This is a unique find.
This is the only library we have with its contents
from the ancient Greco-Roman world.
We have lots of library buildings,
but they're empty, they're just standing shells.
The scrolls are immensely valuable
in the sense that it's the only library from antiquity
that has ever been discovered in place.
All libraries from antiquity have been lost.
But in many respects,
it's an unreadable library
with some 400 to 500 scrolls still sealed shut.
Ancient texts and thought lost in plain sight.
What's really interesting about Herculaneum
is that it brings out your own
personal interests and expectations,
because it's mysterious and intriguing
and entirely open as to what
each one of those individual texts will be.
Determined to learn what lies within,
it was his earlier work with the Ein Gedi Scroll,
which excited those charged
with preserving and protecting Herculaneum's heritage,
and afforded Seales' a new scholarly partnership.
Yes when I saw this clip,
I think let's do with our scrolls.
And so Seales and his team partnered
with the UCLA School of Dentistry
to use the powerful and sensitive X-ray equipment on site
to scan those three scrolls
before installation at the Getty exhibit.
(suspenseful music)
For two of the samples, the team designed form fitting molds
to protect the actual antiquities.
This 3D printed model, which is just made out of plastic
helps us have the exact form and shape
so that this is a lot easier to do than
messing with the real sample, which is a lot more fragile.
Never this papryi were so touched
for so long time.
So far from home. Yeah.
It's everything new.
Yeah, so we have to be careful.
Okay so orientation's pretty important
because this is a form-fitted case
specifically for this shape, so
the real scroll has to be oriented, right,
in exactly this position
so that it'll go in there just as it should.
Are you ready?
Yes. Yes, go.
All right.
Okay.
(plucky music)
Yeah, very nice.
That's a perfect fit too, isn't it?
Perfecto.
Preservation takes priority
throughout the process.
Photo documentation at every step.
Okay you have what you need?
Soft sheets of Teflon
add an extra layer of cushion.
That's cool.
This is the trickiest part of the preparation
for the scanning because you really don't
want to cause any damage beyond just handling it normally.
And so the Teflon is like putting a baby to bed, you know?
With a blanket on the top and on the bottom you know?
You use that kind of care.
Just like you're dealing with a little child,
putting it to bed
in the little form-fitted case,
so that everybody is safe and sound
for the time that the scanner's gonna be running.
Oh very nice.
No pressure.
Awesome.
Very nice job, Luigi, thank you.
Very nice.
Okay, what do you think?
Yeah.
Pretty stable.
Yeah, looks great.
Rock solid.
Ready to go.
Once set, the computers take over,
performing its program, running more than 24 hours.
Set the parameters for that scan and kick it off.
This scanner's platform
rotates slower than the eye can see
in order to capture critical data from every angle.
Here's how it works.
The sample size of every individual point
of this data set we collect will be very, very small.
About the thickness of a strand of silk.
Even better than the size of a human hair.
We need that kind of resolution to be able
to see everything about the detail inside the scrolls.
What I'm seeing right now,
I mean these views are really lovely.
I mean we can see so much structure,
and you see these variations in density
and that's where the curiosity comes in.
You know, what's that, what's causing that?
That's really, really interesting.
(suspenseful music)
The data that we take through X-ray
gives us the platform to do all of the next steps
that allow us to open it up.
Those steps include finding where the layers
that are inside really are in that data.
We call that segmentation, and it just means that
we're finding the layers and modeling what they look like
so that we know exactly
what the shape is that we're dealing with.
That modeling step is actually not that easy
because the layers, you can imagine,
of a wrapped up scroll, or a book that's been crushed,
those layers and their shapes are completely unpredictable.
We don't know in advance what they're gonna look like
until we take the scan,
so we have a computer algorithm that we've built
to be able to find every one of those layers,
identify them, and then model them.
They've done this all before,
so they know understanding
the volume and layout is just the beginning.
Identifying text might be even more complex,
depending on the type of ink used.
In certain situations that's direct,
because the ink is made from iron or lead
and we can just see it.
In other situations, it's more subtle than that
because the ink has to be viewed as just a layer
of material that's very similar to what it's written on,
and so we have to find a way to go ahead
and do that amplification.
The X-ray can pinpoint microscopic shapes,
potential layers of ink,
but then artificial intelligence
will likely provide confirmation
based on a pre-determined reference.
The fact that the ink deposits in a layer
and you can measure the thickness of that layer.
The fact that the ink soaks into the fibers
of the material that you're writing on,
all of those physical phenomenon
end up being measurable by the imaging method
that we're using, and then we can put them together using AI
to amplify what we see with the naked eye.
It's not unlike learning how to do face recognition
by sampling a million different faces
and pointing out to the algorithm, okay that's a face,
that's a face, that's a face,
and then learning from those examples
what a face looks like in an unknown image.
In the case of the Herculaneum scrolls,
the fragments of scrolls damaged
by earlier attempts to unroll them will hopefully
provide Seales with that AI detail
to identify the ancient text.
So I think it's really ironic
and maybe poetically beautiful
that the sacrifice of those early scrolls
might provide the reference that we exactly need
to be able to read the ones that are still inaccessible.
So what we're doing here is we're looking at
the 140 gigabytes of data that we collected overnight.
What we've done here is taken over about 10,000 images,
10,000 radiographs that we're gonna use
to compute the internal structure of the scroll.
With just three days to work
with these incredible relics,
the team compiled a total of approximately
1.3 terabytes of data thanks to
a combined 164 hours in the scanners.
Algorithms will analyze the data sets,
but given the massive amount of data,
and Seales' detailed methodology,
it could take six months to a year
to reach and release any final results.
Well you know, my expectations are always different
from everyone else's.
I expect things to happen quickly,
but what's probably going to happen is that
we will not see the complete text right away
because there are too many computational steps involved
in being really deliberate and systematic about our work.
But when dealing with 2,000 year old documents,
what's a few months mean to learn the secrets held within?
The prospect of non-invasively,
virtually unwrapping these scrolls and reading their texts
is a very exciting breakthrough,
and scholars will potentially have access to a text
that's complete, that's whole, and undamaged.
If I could see one of our scrolls,
seeing the writings,
naturally I'd jump for joy.
What else?
Now that the digital data is collected,
a little patience won't dampen that enthusiasm
and technological promise.
So recognizing the ravages of time
on these ancient artifacts, the Naples National Library
has already expanded its partnership
with Seales and his team.
People take a look around and they say,
we might not have this material with us for always and ever.
(sirens blare)
Notre Dame can burn, and that threat
makes us reevaluate the urgency with which we want to treat
the valuable materials that we have.
In the end, this work
marks an evolution in archeology.
Unobtrusively building a modern library of ancient knowledge
without ever turning a page.
When the Herculaneum scrolls were discovered
250 years ago, we were in the Dark Ages of conservation.
We experimented with these materials.
We as a community, and some of them were destroyed.
I think that these new techniques for imaging
will give us more information than ever before
to transform how conservation is done
so that we don't make those mistakes again.
(somber music)