From archaeological sites to nanoscale: The quest of tailored analytical strategy and modelling

Abstract

Last developments of nano probes allows scientists of Cultural Heritage to assess a new kind of information that is crucial in the different topics concerned by the field: Determining ancient manufacturing processes, studying use and provenance of ancient artefacts, revealing the degradation processes and developing adapted cleaning and conservation treatments. Nevertheless to be useful, these nanoscale approaches must be integrated in a tailored multi-step analysis. The final aim of these approaches will be to reach understanding and/or reliable modelling of the behaviours of the ancient systems. A first part of this chapter will review the issues in Cultural Heritage and the nature of the physico-chemical data that can be collected on the systems. In a second part, a selection of examples dealing with nano characterisation in Cultural Heritage will allow us to present several up to date techniques and methodologies employed in Cultural Heritage science. Then, the third part of the chapter will review some of the different modelling attempts that where already made in the domain of Cultural Heritage, and that were based on the use of physico-chemical descriptions at different scales. The challenge for the next future will be, for different kind of materials and environments, to propose multiscale models from nano to functional scale. Some key steps to face these challenges bridging the gap between multiscale descriptive characterisation and numerical modelling are reviewed here.