CONFOCAL LASER SWEEP MICROSCOPY (CLSM) AND IMAGE RECOGNITION SOFTWARE APPLIED TO THE FUNCTIONAL STUDY OF FLINT ARTEFACTS:

GULICH, D; MEILÁN, P.,; CATTÁNEO G. R; GARAVAGLIA, M.

CAMPINAS, BRAZIL

Congreso; RIAO/OPTILAS IBEROAMERICAN MEETING ON OPTICS AND LATINAMERICAN MEETING ON OPTICS LASER AND THEIR APPLICATIONS; 2007

RIAO

An experimental program started in 2004 with the aim of documenting quantitatively use wear in archaeological stone tools with a nondestructive technique. Micropolishes on tool edge’s have been studied focusing in the traces left by the use of different raw material such as bone, wood, meat and leather. This study has consisted of the capture of images and analysis of such micropolishes. The capture made with a Confocal Laser Sweep Microscope BioRad MRC600 (CLSM) allows us to generate perfectly focused images containing information and an easy measurement of roughness parameters at different scales with a resolution of 256 levels of depth. The quantitative characterization of the images obtained was made implementing an ad-hoc software (PHILOS), that determines diverse descriptors based on the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix of each image (GLCM) (taking advantage of the full dynamic range of the images taken with the CLSM). Such characterization permits the distinction of groups of images and the recognition of new images using distances in the space of the descriptors. In this stage of the work a reference database (a set of standard images of micropolishes as well as their descriptors) has been formulated for its future use in the quantitative characterization of the functional use of archaeological artifacts