HERCULES team is composed of highly motivated researchers from different areas of knowledge, with a common goal since the beginning: to setup an analytical infrastructure that could bring a new approach into heritage research in Portugal and that could put Portugal in the mainstream of European heritage research.
With that in mind, the HERCULES researchers have been working since 2009 towards getting the financial support to acquire state-of-art equipment for the material study of cultural heritage artefacts and to build up the scientific know-how to do it.
This has led to novel opportunities and fields of research that have allowed to foster activities of the Laboratory four main lines of research:
Develop and integrate novel archaeometric approaches to address several key archaeology issues, namely provenance, technologies of production and knowledge about socio-economic behaviors of past civilizations.
Develop innovative, collaborative and cooperative art and historic driven studies that integrate the material dimension to explore the artisitc and traditional techniques and construction technologies.
Meet the real needs of cultural heritge conservation by developing applied research to understand the degradation mechanisms (including biodegradationand environmental agents), develop effective mitigation/treatment strategies and apply novel diagnosis and technological tools.
Focused on Innovation and Development aims to develop and create novel biotechnology-based products and news materials for conservation and to develop and implement digital technologies for diagnosis and heritage dissemination.