No abstract

In the last decades, the interest in the development of protective coatings for movable and immovable Cultural Heritage (CH) assets has decidedly increased. This has been mainly prompted by the raising consciousness on preservation requirements for cultural artefacts and monuments, which has consequently determined the development of new protective products. From acrylic resins used at the end of the last century to the up-to-date biomaterials and nanoparticles employed nowadays, the research has made a giant step forward. This article reviews the progresses, the technical challenges, and the most recent advances in protective coatings for archaeological metal, glass, and stone artefacts. It aims at offering a comprehensive and critical overview of the progressions in conservation science and displaying how research has optimized polymers in order to solve deterioration problems. Attention is given to recently developed materials, hybrid coatings, and corrosion inhibitors. This work seeks to provide a reference point for future research and to offer a wide-ranging introduction on the newly available material technologies to restorers and conservators.

Automated detection of landscape patterns on Remote Sensing imagery has seen virtually little or no development in the archaeological domain, notwithstanding the fact that large portion of cultural landscapes worldwide are characterized by land engineering applications. The current extraordinary availability of remotely sensed images makes it now urgent to envision and develop automatic methods that can simplify their inspection and the extraction of relevant information from them, as the quantity of information is no longer manageable by traditional "human" visual interpretation. This paper expands on the development of automatic methods for the detection of target landscape features-represented by field system patterns-in very high spatial resolution images, within the framework of an archaeological project focused on the landscape engineering embedded in Roman cadasters. The targets of interest consist of a variety of similarly oriented objects of diverse nature (such as roads, drainage channels, etc.) concurring to demark the current landscape organization, which reflects the one imposed by Romans over two millennia ago. The proposed workflow exploits the textural and shape properties of real-world elements forming the field patterns using multiscale analysis of dominant oriented response filters. Trials showed that this approach provides accurate localization of target linear objects and alignments signaled by a wide range of physical entities with very different characteristics.