Caroline Roberts and Suzanne Davis, conservators at the Kelsey Museum, are pleased to announce the launch of their website, Investigating Color in Roman Egypt. The website is the culmination of a two-year endeavor in which pigments and dyes on more than 150 artifacts from the Kelsey’s Roman Egyptian collection were imaged and analyzed. The project—funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and headquartered at the Kelsey Museum—united various academic disciplines and involved hands-on participation by graduate and undergraduate students.
The new Investigating Color website includes research workflows, equipment lists, bibliographies, and case studies of select Kelsey Museum artifacts examined during the conservators’ extensive technical survey—from the remains of ancient hairnets to a ceramic dog figurine to a wooden castanet. Carrie and Suzanne hope that the online toolkit they compiled will allow students, teachers, and researchers to apply scientific approaches to the exploration of ancient color in other collections.
