THE PALIMPSEST THAT WASN'T: ERASURE, FORGERY, AND THE LIMITS OF MULTISPECTRAL IMAGING

Multispectral and hyperspectral imaging have transformed the study of erased and overwritten manuscripts, allowing scholars to recover undertexts once assumed lost beyond recovery, most famously in the case of the Archimedes Palimpsest. This success has produced a widespread, largely unexamined assumption within manuscript studies: that imaging technology is capable of distinguishing, reliably and in all cases, between genuine erasure produced by manuscript reuse and erasure or alteration introduced by later forgers, restorers, or well-meaning conservators. This article argues that this assumption is not warranted by the imaging technology itself, and that multispectral recovery, while extraordinarily powerful for reading suppressed text, is comparatively weak as a tool for establishing the authenticity and chronology of that text's erasure. The article surveys the technical basis of multispectral and hyperspectral imaging as applied to parchment and papyrus, distinguishes the kinds of questions the technology can and cannot answer, and examines documented cases in which imaging results were initially treated as settling questions of authenticity that they had not, in fact, settled, including instances of retouched or supplemented undertexts and disputed medieval and early modern forgeries discovered only through subsequent codicological and chemical analysis. The article contends that the interpretive gap between "the imaging recovered a text" and "the imaging established that this text is original and this erasure is authentic" has been insufficiently theorized in the manuscript studies literature, which has tended to treat successful image recovery as self-authenticating. Drawing on the philology of textual criticism and on conservation science, the article proposes a set of methodological safeguards, including mandatory codicological and material corroboration before imaging results are cited as evidence of authenticity, and argues for a sharper disciplinary distinction between recovery and verification as two related but logically separate achievements.