Western University’s Sustainable Archeology project contributes to AGO exhibit

April 22, 2016

A member of the Faculty of Social Science has contributed to an international investigation into the construction of miniature art, led by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Andrew Nelson, from the Department of Anthropology, and Western University’s Sustainable Archeology project specializes in microCT. MicroCT is an imaging techniques to non-destructively capture and analyze human skeletal remains and archaeological artifacts.

Along with scientists at the Canadian Conservation Institute, London's Museum of Natural History (UK) and NASA, Nelson assisted Conservators from the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to investigate the making of as boxwood prayer beads, rosaries and miniature altarpieces from Northern Europe during the early 1500s.

Western News spoke to Andrew Nelson and Lisa Ellis about the exhibit.

See a demonstration of a microCT scan of a prayer bead. 

Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures opens at the AGO on Nov. 5, 2016 and runs until Jan. 22, 2017.