Novel approaches to the Re-assembly, Re-association and Re-unification of cultural heritage collections – the GRAVITATE project solution

Abstract

The vast majority of archaeological objects are discovered in a fragmentary state, and the poor state of preservation. Moreover, pieces of historical importance and interest may be dispersed across different collections and museums: accidents, wars, natural disasters, human intervention or the ravages of time, often causes the fragmentation of important art pieces and make their reassembly difficult and even impossible due to missing, eroded parts or different ownerships of fragments of a same object. In other cases objects cannot be reached physically, due to various restrictions, such as storage, permanent exhibition or fragility of their preservation state. The paper will introduce an innovative approach to the R3 challenges that these archaeological problems pose: Re-assembly, Re-association, Re-unification of broken artefacts. The novelty relies on the integration of semantic description and similarity search, based on multi-modal indexing of data and information such as 3D geometry, colour, patterns or features, and non-structured texts. The tools described have been developed by a team of researchers within the EU funded project GRAVITATE. The structure and functionality of the GRAVITATE platform will be showcased through the presentation of real archaeological material, such as the 6th century B.C. Salamis (Cyprus) collection of fragmented terracotta statues, unearthed in Cyprus more than a century ago and since then divided among Cyprus and major UK museums.