The story of the past is only partly told; the record of human history is a mere fragment. Worse, those remaining artifacts that stand witness to our shared cultural heritage are under unprecedented threat from global strife and global warming.
The Lazarus Project is an interdisciplinary initiative that brings together experts in the sciences and the humanities to recover the lost stories of our collective past and fill in the gaps in the record of human knowledge. Like the Hubble telescope that peers back through eons to reveal the remotest origins of the universe, the Lazarus Project uses cutting-edge technologies, such as spectral imaging, to discover universes of hidden knowledge in the damaged and overwritten pages of medieval manuscripts, the faded surfaces of old maps, the cryptic drawings on cave walls, and the inscriptions on ancient artifacts. Our task is to use science to see the invisible, read the illegible, visualize the obscure, conserve the past, and educate the present.