Cultural Heritage Destruction: Documenting Parchment Degradation via Multispectral Imaging

Abstract

This paper describes the methodology and presents preliminary results of a project using multispectral imaging to document the deterioration of parchment. A series of treatments has been applied to degrade samples from a deaccessioned manuscript using both physical and chemical agents. Each sample is photographed before and after the treatment by a multispectral imaging system to record the effect of the treatments on both the writing and the parchment. Here we present the initial imaging of the samples, and we show how some of the agents affect the writing and parchment.