Using laser technology in combination with more traditional techniques, conservationists hope to have restored and cleaned a large portion of the pollution-scarred Parthenon sculptures by the summer of 2004. They are to be displayed in the new Acropolis Museum that Greece wants to have ready for the Games.

Late on Tuesday, the Culture Ministry’s top board of antiquities, the Central Archaeological Council, sanctioned the use of lasers for cleaning the blackened West Frieze of the temple.

The frieze consists of 16 slabs of marble quarried from Mount Pendeli, decorated in relief with a procession at the ancient Panathenaean festival held in honor of Athena, the patron goddess of Athens. Carved between 438 and 432 BC, the frieze was removed in 1993 to prevent further damage from acid rain.

The decision to use lasers followed lengthy testing on other, undecorated blocks of Pendelic marble from the fifth-century-BC Acropolis monuments. Work will start in three months’ time and each block will take six weeks to clean. Blasting with minute aluminium particles will also be used.