A $14 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation is coming to the University of Kentucky to enhance its heritage science program. Heritage science is described as the interdisciplinary domain of scientific study of cultural or natural heritage. Principal Investigator Brent Seales said much of the grant funding will go to pay for equipment. Seales noted the mobile set can be used for research on materials not suitable for removal and transporting to a lab. “If you have stuff you can bring to the lab, then you use the bench kit, because the bench is the stuff that’s going to be high dollar, high precision in its own fixed eco-system,” said Seales.
Seales garnered international attention for his virtual unwrapping work to read damaged ancient artifacts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. He said the NSF timeline calls for a prototype project by the beginning of the third year of the grant. Seales added equipment purchased through this grant could help read huge globes popular in the 15th and 16th centuries. “There just isn’t a machine that you can buy that you can just use to do anything on any of those globes. It’s an artifact that just isn’t going to have a machine dedicated for it. So, flex would be the equipment you would use to solve problems like that.”
The grant also covers bench and mobile, out-in-the-field, research. Another big part of this type of natural heritage work involves artificial intelligence. A multi-million-dollar renovation is planned for UK’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology.
