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A Northwestern University research team has taken CSI to a whole new level: employing sophisticated scientific tools to investigate details of the materials and methods used by Roman-Egyptian artists to paint lifelike mummy portraits more than 2,000 years ago. These visages of the dead are considered to be antecedents of Western portraiture. Marc Walton and his interdisciplinary team have uncovered telling clues about the paintings' underlying surface shapes and colors. The new details, when coupled together, provide the researchers with very strong evidence as to how many of the 15 mummy portraits and panel paintings were made. Walton, a senior...

By combining two imaging techniques (visible hyperspectral imaging and x-ray fluorescence), a diverse team of Northwestern University researchers has developed a new technology that gives access to medieval texts hidden in parchment re-used for ancient book-bindings, as Live Science reported. The new technology is seen by researchers as truly innovative, as it can be used to help decipher the text under the surface of other bookbinding materials. "For generations, scholars have thought this information was inaccessible, so they thought, 'Why bother?'" the study's senior researcher, Marc Walton, a senior scientist at the Northwestern University-Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific...