Highly magnified views of archaeological artifacts display their extraordinary hidden beauty and reveal intriguing clues about how they were crafted and used long ago.
For example, a 17th-century Persian textile contains fibers of silk thread that were individually wrapped with thin strips of metal. And the microstructure of a needle from Cyprus retains the touch of the person who shaped it, in traces of dark corrosion that emerged as the needle was rotated and hammered.
These and other zoomed-in archaeological images are showcased in a new exhibit called "
Invisible Beauty: The Art of Archaeological Science," which opens at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia on Jan. 16.
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