Cultural heritage

Preserving and conserving the cultural treasures of humanity: Brilliant X-rays open up unusual insights into valuable cultural treasures without damaging them in the process.

Uncovering secrets in amber

Amber holds many a secret. For example, the bright X-ray light from DESY’s synchrotron radiation source PETRA III revealed 56 fly larvae in a piece of Baltic amber. They have been sitting on the droppings of a herbivore for about 38 million years. This information, among others, has given scientists a new insight: At the time, the place where the amber was ultimately found was an open, well-tempered habitat and not a steaming, dense jungle.

A picture behind the picture

The X-ray light source makes it possible to look underneath the paint. Pictures that have been painted over on the same canvas thus become visible again: for example, the portrait of a woman concealed underneath a van Gogh painting of a grassland scene.

Covered by colour layers of a meadow in summer, the portrait of an elderly woman is made visible by an X-ray light source. — Image: TU Delft

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Decipher ancient texts

Even ancient texts can be deciphered: X-rays are suitable for examining manuscripts of all kinds, made of parchment, clay or leather. Sometimes the written artefacts have been pressed or folded, so that the individual layers can no longer be separated. In X-ray vision, the writing hidden by the overlapping of the pages becomes visible again.

The knowledge gained is helping to save ancient written documents from disintegration or to restore them.

With PETRA IV, scientists aim to expand the development of standard procedures for analysing written artefacts. Such procedures need to both identify the different materials and uncover their underlying structure. To this end, DESY is cooperating with the cluster of excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” at the University of Hamburg.