New Mary Rose website to help public and scientists unravel wreck's mysteries
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Version 0 of 1. Weathered, mottled, and missing several teeth, the skull of a carpenter from the Mary Rose is a poignant sight. A long, wiggling suture can be seen across the crown where the bones fused as the man aged. If you gaze deep into an empty eye-socket, inner fissures can be seen. This is death, up close and personal. But it is also digital. Part of an ambitious online project, launching today, the skull is an interactive 3D model of physical remains recovered from the wreck of Henry VIII’s great flagship, which sank during the Battle of the Solent in 1545. Named Virtual Tudors, and produced from a collaboration between Swansea University, the Mary Rose Trust and Oxford University, the website will host 10 other virtual skulls for academics worldwide to analyse. The goal, the team say, is to assess whether experts can glean as much from such ‘digital remains’ as the real thing: if so, it would allow many more researchers to analyse such finds and draw insights from them - from an individual’s age and sex to the diseases they experienced. But it isn’t only academics who are able to explore the virtual skulls: in a separate public section, the carpenter’s skull will be available for everyone to examine, together with similar rotatable, high-resolution 3D images of a selection of the carpenter’s tools and personal items found on board the ship, including his wood-plane and whetstone holder. The hope, the team say, is that the public section will captivate a wider audience than can be reached by through a museum alone, and bring the story of those who perished on the Mary Rose to life. “[The ship] is a workplace for the people on board, it’s a home and it’s a machine and it’s a warship and it’s also a moment in time,” said Alex Hildred, head of research and curator of human remains at the Mary Rose Trust. Raised in 1982, the Mary Rose has long captured the public’s imagination, with the superbly-preserved artefacts offering up a host of insights into the lives of those who set sail on her - of whom only around 35 survived when the ship sank. Of the 500 or so crew who died, a multitude of bones including 179 skulls (all male) have been recovered. Some skulls have been attributed to men doing particular jobs, such as a gunner or cook, and form part of new displays at the recently revamped Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth. The remains of the supposed carpenter were found in a storeroom below the master carpenter’s cabin, with a tools and a sawhorse nearby. Also found, in the doorway of the Carpenter’s cabin, were the remains of dog (named Hatch by researchers) that would have been in charge of rodent control. “The closet genetic affinity is with the Jack Russell, but with some whippet and greyhound within it as well,” said Hildred. A strong man between 30 and 40 years old, and around 5ft 7in tall, the carpenter, says Hildred, suffered from a number of complaints, including arthritis in his spine, ribs and left collarbone and a large - and likely very painful - abscess in his jaw. “He had a wound, possibly a scar from perhaps fighting or something, that goes across his forehead,” she said. Accessible online to the public, the team hope that the carpenter’s skull and artefacts will capture the imagination of the all who view them. But Virtual Tudors is also an experiment. While museums worldwide are embracing the burgeoning trend for capturing collections in digital form, the question remains as to whether these virtual objects can actually be useful for research. With the new project, the team are hoping to provide an answer, challenging bone experts around the world to scrutinise the skulls and complete questionnaires on their osteological observations, as well as sharing information about the type of device they are viewing the virtual skulls on. “We will take those results from around the world and try and compare them to a study we did when people looked at the real remains,” said Richard Johnston, materials scientist and engineer from Swansea University. A skull, the team add, can offer a number of insights. “You can estimate the sex of an individual, you can estimate the ancestry of an individual and you can certainly diagnose the pathology of an individual: things like scurvy and a number of other conditions,” said Nick Owen, a sport and exercise biomechanist also from Swansea University. At the heart of the project is a technique known as photogrammetry. For each of the skulls, around 120 high resolution photographs were painstakingly taken from many different angles, with the in-focus sections digitally stitched together to produce the final, state-of-the-art, 3D models. The team hope the approach could help in reconstructing the skeletons of the ill-fated crew while avoiding problems of damage and contamination from handling, as well as democratising access to the bones, allowing many more to glean insights from the remains. “It has the potential to speed up science massively,” said Johnston. Elizabeth Craig-Atkins, a human osteologist at Sheffield University and who was not involved in the project, is optimistic about the digital approach. “This idea of opening up interaction with archaeological material to a much wider audience is a really important one,” she said. But, she adds, there are still details that are best gleaned from the physical remains themselves, including the subtleties of surface texture and colour that could hint at a particular disease, as well as the need for physical remains in order to take samples for DNA or conduct structural analysis. |