The use of industrial Computed Tomography in the study of archaeological finds

The successful use of Computed Tomography (CT) as an efficient and powerful non-destructive tool for the study of archaeological artifacts has been reported by several authors [1-4]. The 3D reconstruction of the ob-jects enables the archeologists to carry out archeological analysis. Information about manufacturing and as-sembly techniques as well as information useful for dating artifacts or choosing appropriate maintenance and restoration procedures can be obtained with this technique [5]. Most of the studies of archeological artifacts reported in literature are carried out by using medical CT [6-8], whereas investigations performed with in-dustrial CT systems are rather limited. Our work illustrates the results obtained with a high resolution CT system for industrial applications developed in our laboratories. The CT system is equipped with a 450 kV X-ray tube and an area detector of 40 x 30 cm2 consisting of a scintillator screen, a mirror and a CCD cam-era. The advantage of our system compared to medical CT is the higher penetration capability that allows in-vestigating high density objects. The system provides isotropic spatial resolution and fast data acquisition thanks to the cone-beam geometry. In this study we have focused on the demonstration of the capability of extracting and analyzing an item from a cluster. To this aim we have investigated a ceramic vase with diame-ter of 20 cm filled with ancient coins.