During the past five years, there has been an intensifying cooperation between DESY as one of the world’s leading accelerator research centres and Universität Hamburg’s Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” (UWA) / Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) as the leading international centre for research on written artefacts. The cooperation draws on the huge potential of the large-scale analytical facilities at DESY offering unprecedented experimental capabilities for cultural heritage objects and the long-standing experience of UWA/CSMC to create sustainable research links bridging humanities, natural sciences and computer sciences.

Collaborative research activities take place in various joint UHH/DESY projects:

• In a collaboration between Christian Schroer (DESY) and Cécile Michel (UWA/CSMC) a portable high-resolution X-ray tomographic scanner was built for reading cuneiform clay tablets wrapped in clay envelopes. The scanner will be used for its first large-scale measurement campaign in 2023 at the Louvre and will then travel to Turkey and Iraq. The collaboration on the cuneiform clay tablets between DESY and CSMC started with an idea that was funded in an early PIER funded seed project in 2018.
• Patrick Huber (DESY) and Giovanni Ciotti (UWA/CSMC) collaborate to analyse the material structures of palm leaves as a historically very important writing material. X-ray scattering is used to reveal the nano-/mesoscopic structure of palm leaves in order to fingerprint collections of palm leaf manuscripts, including those in Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg.
• In a recent collaboration formed by Sylvio Haas (DESY) and Agnieszka Helman-Ważny (UWA/CSMC) the nanostructure features of paper are measured. Using the SAXSMAT BL their work will contribute to understanding the origin of paper manuscripts and the techniques of paper production. The first PhD position shared between DESY and UWA/CSMC has recently been filled for this project and a position for a postdoctoral researcher co-funded through a Helmholtz-OCPC program was approved.
• Martin Etter (DESY) and Szilvia Sövegjártó (UWA/CSMC) use synchrotron powder X-ray diffraction (SPXRD) at beamline P02.1 for measurements and phase analysis of cuneiform clay tablets. The aim is to fingerprint the mineral components of tablets in museums around the world that often originate from illegal and/or undocumented excavations.

Further joint research activities between DESY and UWA/CSMS are planned such as separating layers in pasteboards of manuscripts to retrieve lost archives or studies of oxidation states of metals in carbon and early iron gall inks.

The cooperation is expected in particular to lead to new methodologies in material analysis and fingerprinting towards systematic approaches in provenance research that will substantially contribute to the societally most relevant debates on the provenance of cultural objects.

The category “PIER Emerging Topics” was created to account for relatively novel fields of research cooperation between DESY and UHH with great societal relevance and an increasing number of joint research activities. If evaluated positively by the PIER Executive Board after a trial period of two years, "PIER Emerging Topics" are turned into regular PIER Research or Competence Fields.

For more information on artefact profiling as the newest "PIER Emerging Topic" please visit our website.

Teaser image: A tsakali manuscript in a special sample holder before being examined with the X-ray beam/ © DESY/Marta Mayer