Understanding written artefacts

Written artefacts can tell us much more than meets the eye. Apart from their written content or design, the great variety of artefacts’ materials stores a wealth of information – about their production and preparatory treatment, practices of writing, use and reuse, storage and deterioration, as well as possible traces of conserving interventions. The concept of material memory, which describes the stratified sum of these traces, tallies with recent developments in codicology under the term ‘stratigraphy’ (‘archaeology of the manuscript book’). Material analysis can uncover this wealth of information and shed light on the chemical and biological identity, provenance and history of a written artefact through discovering, identifying and determining its original and acquired properties. Artefact Profiling on written artefacts is a joint scientific project consisting of scientists from Universität Hamburg (UHH), Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH) and Deutsches Elelektronen-Synchrotron (DESY).