 Six months ago, this 12th century coin was a rusted pile of rubble. Meet the person who changed all that. Okinawa's historical treasures have faced harsh treatment over the centuries. Time, war, and even the climate are challenges for preservation. But at OIST, one woman is combining science and art to save the treasures of the past. My name's Anya Donnie, and I'm an art conservator here at OIST, and I do collaborative projects with the local museums in Okinawa. Conservation is kind of an umbrella term, which includes preservation. And really when you preserve something, you want to preserve it the way it is as a sort of time capsule. The history and everything the artifact has gone through is also something that we want to preserve. Conserving artifacts can be no easy task, and when the Yantanza Museum brought the excavated coin to Anya, she knew there was a challenge ahead. The coin that we worked on was in numerous pieces. I'd say at least ten large fragments and a pile of just a hundred tiny, tiny little bits when we got it. Archaeology frequently turns up severely degraded objects. Hard to imagine, but this was an arrowhead, and this was a metal spike. You know, they give me the objects that are in the poorest condition because I have the skills to, you know, to fix them. And at OIST, Anya had an arsenal of technology at her disposal. One of the exciting things about OIST is all of the access to the many scientific techniques that they have here. That there are, you know, museums all over the world, artifacts all over the world. But often you maybe only have access to one or two scientific techniques and a normal conservation lab. But here, you know, we have just so many different techniques that the biologists and the physicists use at OIST. And we can work with them to find interesting ways to use their equipment and apply them to the study of art materials. Working alongside Kasia Baluk, a graduate intern from the Winterthur University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation, the two set to work on their daunting task. X-ray fluorescence allowed them to learn which elements the coin was made of without damaging its structure. Learning it was made from leaded bronze was the first step in the coin's preservation. Through our imaging techniques, we're able to bring out those inscriptions which help staff at the museum to be able to, like, read the coin more clearly. In her collaborations with the Yantanza Museum, Anya is helping to conserve important pieces of Okinawa's history for future generations. From the time of the artifacts creation and all the history it has seen along the way to the present. It's a skill set that sees Anya at the intersection of science and art. My background is in chemistry and art and art history and physics, and I have to mix all of that together. I really have to put on the science hat and think about how is it deteriorating, what are the materials or chemicals that I can use to help it, but then when I'm actually executing the treatment, applying really small brushstrokes or something, I have to put on that, like, artist hat. It's a combination of disciplines that is paying off, telling us more about a past as we move into the future. When you bring the objects back to the museum in the end and they see the results and they know kind of what they might have thought was a lost cause, and now it looks, you know, great, beautiful, they can read it and everyone has smiles on their faces. Well, that's also a really great thing.