Application of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to surface bone changes in paleopathology

Abstract

The paper associated to this repository evaluates the applicability of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to the study of pathological surface changes in human remains. A sample of 45 human bones and teeth from medieval and early modern Estonian cemeteries was photographed and subjected to RTI imaging to document the pathological conditions that more frequently result in subtle surface modifications. Subperiosteal bone production (SBP), abnormal porosity, cribra orbitalia, endocranial lesions and lytic lesions in bone, and enamel hypoplasia and dental calculus in teeth were successfully represented with this technique. The results indicate that RTI allows visualizing shallow and discrete bone changes otherwise unnoticed. Although it cannot entirely replace microscopic and radiological techniques, RTI can be successfully performed in a reasonable time by non-specialist operators with limited funding and resources, and enables to identify the specimens that should be subject to more expensive or time-consuming analyses. Each zip file in the repository includes the following items: one or more standard photographs of the specimen for comparison, the original complete .rti file, and a folder containing the snapshots of the RTI images obtained with RTIViewer. By default, snapshots of eight standard light rakings, together with the specular enhancement and the normals visualization rendering modes were acquired. When needed, additional magnified snapshots were provided, and are named with View (no.) in the folders.