Biological anthropology

About: Biological anthropology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1126 publications have been published within this topic receiving 12757 citations. The topic is also known as: biological anthropology & somatology.

Anthropology: One-man multidisciplinarian

Abstract: EV LED illumination system. This combines high-resolution photography with multispectral imaging, which captures data at frequencies across the electromagnetic spectrum. It can reveal once-unreadable texts, because different inks reflect light in different spectra differently. Thus papyrologist Roberta Mazza has discovered the ‘Last Supper amulet’, a papyrus with biblical passages on one side and a grain-tax receipt on the other. Mazza traced its provenance to near ancient Hermoupolis in Egypt, close to modern Al Ashmunayn. We are also collaborating with scientists including Mark Dickinson, a physicist and medical-imaging specialist at Manchester’s Photon Science Institute. Medical imaging is rich in techniques that can be used to analyse artefacts, such as optical coherence tomography, which is usually harnessed for imaging tissue or visualizing blood flow. Dickinson has tested it on carbonized papyri too delicate to unroll, revealing hidden text. Also key to investigating the collections is image analysis. We are using statistical techniques such as canonical variate analysis (CVA), which compares group structures in multivariate data, to read erased text on palimp sests. CVA is applied to a multispectral image and an algorithm is trained to recognize over lying text, the erased underlying text and areas where the two coincide. This effectively maximizes the contrast, so the undertext ‘pops’ out and becomes more readable. A £1-million image-analysis project that grew partly out of a collaboration with the CHICC and has received funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council is studying the Syriac Galen Palimpsest. This is an eleventh-century liturgical work that carries an erased sixth-century undertext — a Syriac translation of On Simple Drugs by the classical physician Galen (around ad 129–216). We already had a large data set of multi spectral images; now images of the same page are being combined to make the undertext more legible (see picture). Overseeing this is computational primatologist Bill Sellers, who ordinarily uses computer modelling to reconstruct the movements and evolution of extinct species. All of this work generates large sets of images, stored as TIFF files. These raise the question of how to store and analyse big data. A challenge will be establishing integrated systems to allow comparative research across platforms. For Greek papyri and Hebrew and Persian manuscripts, we plan to develop solutions with the Cambridge Digital Library; this will feed into the iLibrary strategy to bring our digital collections and projects under one roof. We can also look at large amounts of texts and metadata with the tools of computational corpus linguistics — which studies language through samples of real text — and text mining, which hunts through text to extract data. One such tool is the languageprocessing software system U-Compare. Some of our collections are born digital — for example, we hold the e-mail archives of local literary publishing house Carcanet — and future researchers will undoubtedly approach these differently from how they look at hand-written correspondence. We have begun to collaborate with computational linguists at Manchester’s National Centre for Text Mining, as well as colleagues at the nearby Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, who have vast experience with large sets of multilingual texts. And with palaeography — the study of ancient handwritings, their dating and their classification — artificial intelligence might offer research avenues that the institute is keen to explore. By training software to recognize certain hands and writing styles, one might be able to query vast virtual collections of manuscripts in unprecedented ways. Delivering the institute’s inaugural lecture, historian Ann Blair of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said: “In embracing new media, we must never discard the old ones.” The interdisciplinary nature of the institute is its signature, the tie that binds ancient artefacts to state-of-the-art science. These form a dual legacy for future generations, who will want to ask different questions of the library’s remarkable holdings. ■