The past three weeks have been frenetic to say the least.  The photography part of our project is now complete (a whole week ahead of schedule!) and I don’t mind admitting that there were big sighs of relief all round as we finished photographing our 1,029th object.  After viewing some of the initial raw images however, we soon realised that all of the intense hard work was worthwhile.  The close-ups taken of certain blades, especially some of the bronze age swords and axes, are astounding.  The extremely high resolution of the images are of such good quality that all manner of scratch marks, notches and other signs of use can be seen clearly. 

All of the raw images are currently in the process of being copied, renamed and reformatted, but I’m sure that when we get the finished product the Cutting Edge team will agree it was worth being holed up in a basement store for three weeks.

Tools and weapons from the ethnography collection laid out ready for photography.

Photographer Colin Davison gets in close to capture the detail on a stone adze from Papua New Guinea. This object is also one of our case studies and will undergo use wear analysis to provide us with even more data.