Robert H. Johnston, 77; Explored Ancient Documents With Digital Technology

Robert H. Johnston, an archeologist and teacher who combined his interest in ancient texts with digital imaging technology to help uncover new information about the Dead Sea Scrolls and other rare documents, died Oct. 19 at his home in Rochester, N.Y. He was 77.

I learned much about Johnson in the past five years as the Carl Denham Restoration Project worked to decipher various etched artwork and glyphs present on "Skull Island" artifacts recovered in France. Much of what we were able to piece together was thanks to techniques that grew directly from Johnson's innovations.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"Bob was a pioneer," said Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project at USC. "He built a bridge between technical enhancement and the humanities."

Zuckerman supplied Johnston with photographs of the so-called Temple Scroll, which is 28 feet, the longest and one of the most important in the Dead Sea collection.

Johnston and his team, including Roger L. Easton, an imaging scientist on the school faculty, as well as others at Eastman Kodak Co. and the Xerox Corp., found 18 Hebrew letters on the scroll, which describes an ideal Hebrew temple.

"That might not sound like a lot, but whole matters of history can turn on a single, specific letter," Zuckerman said.

Johnston and his team made other breakthroughs when they examined a 10th century copy of a treatise by Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who died in 212 BC.

The original Archimedes text, "On the Method of Mechanical Theorems," had been erased so the parchment could be reused as a prayer book. In addition to new text, the pages were covered with painted images and candle wax.

"We were able to extract things that had been trapped," Easton said Thursday of the book and other documents he and Johnston examined. "Bob was the conduit between the scholars and the technicians."

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