For centuries, conservators repairing cracked or incomplete ceramic artifacts have reached for plaster. It fills the gap, but it tells them nothing about what happens to the object afterward. A team at Koç University in Turkey has developed a method that does both.
The research, published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage and reported by Phys.org, describes a process that combines photogrammetry, digital modeling, 3D printing, and embedded sensors to create custom fills for damaged archaeological ceramics. The fills match the missing sections of individual artifacts precisely, and they carry sensors that can track environmental and physical changes affecting the object over time.
The process starts with photography. Researchers take hundreds of overlapping photographs of a damaged amphora, then feed them into photogrammetry software that builds a precise three-dimensional digital model of the object. The missing section is reconstructed digitally, and a custom fill is produced using 3D printing.
What separates this method from a conventional repair is what goes inside the fill. The printed piece can contain sensors designed to detect changes in temperature, humidity, pH, and physical stress. Because the sensors sit inside the repair itself rather than somewhere else in the storage room or display case, they measure conditions directly at the artifact.
That distinction matters. Shifts in humidity and temperature can drive salt migration through ceramic material, cause deformation, and create microfractures over time. Monitoring those changes at the object itself gives conservators a more accurate picture of risk than general room measurements can provide.
The research team tested the method using maritime amphorae from two collections. The first group consisted of Günsenin IV amphorae recovered from the late Byzantine Çamaltı Burnu I shipwreck, which are now displayed at the Bandırma Archaeology Museum in Turkey. The second was a mixed collection of amphorae from a separate group. The study was conducted through collaboration between Koç University's Mustafa V. Koç Maritime Archaeology Research Center and its Manufacturing and Automation Research Center.
The researchers named on the study are Savannah Ulalian Bishop, Munam Arshad, İsmail Lazoğlu, Matthew Harpster, and Hammad Ur Rehman.
The approach is designed to be systematic and repeatable, offering a framework that other conservation teams could apply to ceramics from different archaeological contexts. The sensors embedded in the fills could allow conservators to catch deterioration early, before cracks or other damage become visible on the surface of an artifact.
