Ask the Expert 5. Designing CT Image Analysis for Your Research – What to Quantify

We invited Prof. Chandra Reedy from the University of Delaware and asked her questions about how she chose what to quantify using the CT images to extract meaningful and trustworthy information about ancient ceramics.

Prof. Reedy has been studying the preservation of traditional technologies and their associated materials and intangible cultural heritage. In recent years, she has combined fieldwork with laboratory analysis, including X‑ray CT, to gain insight into archaeological and ethnographic ceramics.

We asked her:

1. What are ceramic cultural materials and how does CT contribute to our understanding of them?
2. What are the challenges with using CT to study these materials?
3. What is your standard operating procedure when planning data collection and analysis for these materials?
4. How do you choose meaningful parameters to quantify during CT data analysis?
5. What properties are most telling about how a given material was made or used?
6. What advice do you have when designing experiments to characterize archaeological samples with unknown history?