BBCnews is featuring this article about a new use for laser scanners and computer cutters... creating exact duplicates of ancient clay tablets.

I think this technology is completely amazing. For a long time in the archeology/anthropology field one of the toughest things was getting a fossile or artifact out to other people for review. The best you could hope for was an expensive, reasonably-but-not-quite accurate cast of the object. Far more common was the less-than-ideal photographs or diagrams. Heated academic debates have gone on for decades simply because people couldn't get a good look at the items.

I think it's only a matter of time before the laser scanners get small and cheap enough to take out into the field. The cutters and carvers will probably never be very portable, but like paper copy machines probably won't need to be.

I find it amazing to think that some day, probably soon, a paleoanthropologist will dig out a skull or jaw or tooth, place it in a scanner, make a transmission, and literally within minutes colleagues on the other side of the world could be looking at a high-fidelity model of what was just pulled out of the ground. What's more, copies of that file could be made and, like the clay tablets in the BBC article, created by anyone with access to the correct machine.

Amazing.