Recent Progress in Cultural Heritage Diagnostics

Dear Colleagues,

As novel technological advances emerge in the field of cultural heritage analysis, together with evolving challenges that demand inovative approaches, the diagnosis of cultural heritage materials has evolved into an interdisciplinary field of breakthrough research. Interdisciplinarity plays an important role in studying, understanding, and protecting cultural heritage objects. Τhe complex questions related to human history and several aspects of cultural heritage require a combination of deep scientific understanding and analytical methodologies in order to be answered.

This Special Issue aims to bring together researchers from different research fields such as materials science, chemistry, physics, art history, archaeometry, archaeology, and computer science, together with museum experts and conservators, in order to unravel the materiality of the past. The objective is to give prominence to interdisciplinary approaches by sharing research and expertise on novel diagnostic methods and technologies that can aid in either characterizing or dating a wide range of materials—metals, ceramics, glass, textiles, pigments, and organic materials—commonly found in cultural heritage artifacts.

Thus, this Special Issue wishes to start a dialogue on the interdisciplinarity applied to cultural heritage studies (including studies on original materials, their degradation products, and the preservation state of the artefact), including cutting-edge applications to already existing techniques, innovative techniques along with their methodological standardization, data interpretability, Artificial Intelligence, and big data analysis.

Specific areas of interest for this Special Issue include but are not limited to:

• Non-invasive analytical methods for material identification;
• Novel laboratory methodologies;
• New or enhanced analytical protocols of analysis;
• Machine learning algorithms for data analysis and pattern recognition;
• Climate-sensitive degradation processes and their diagnostics;
• Provenance studies employing isotopic or elemental analyses;
• Artificial Intelligence;
• Big data analysis.

Dr. Nikolaos Laskaris
Dr. Lamprini Malletzidou
Dr. Anastasia Rousaki
Dr. Georgios S. Polymeris
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Heritage is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• non-invasive analytical methods
• machine learning
• big data analysis
• Artifical Inteligence
• diagnosis of cultural heritage materials
• degradation
• preservation state of the artifact