View allAll Photos Tagged 3dscanning
This irregular chalk block was recovered from the deliberate backfill of a communication trench at Larkhill, Wiltshire. The chalk block has inscribed upon it the names of 12 Australian Soldiers of A Company, 43rd Battalion, 11th Brigade, 3rd Division; including that of Lawrence Carthage Weathers.
To find out more about the chalk block and the story of Lawrence Weathers, please follow the link below:
A Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin which was recovered from a dump of rubbish at Larkhill, on Salisbury Plain. This tin post-dates the First World War as it carries the “By Royal Appointment” seal of King George V, which was granted in 1922. The legend on the back of the tin shows gives an interesting view of how sweet, sugary food was marketed in the past. Lyle’s golden syrup has certainly been to some interesting places. Captain Robert Scott took some with him on his ill-fated attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1912. When Scott’s stores were rediscovered in 1956 both the tins and the syrup inside were still in good condition. Today more than 1,000,000 tins leave the syrup factory on the banks of the Thames each month, heading as far afield as the USA, China, Australia and South Africa.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from the Three Chequers Medical Practice, a GP surgery in central Salisbury which offers support to carers and ex-carers.
To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
Found in Bulford, Wiltshire this pottery is a great example of the 'Woodlands' sub-style. It was made when construction work began at Stonehenge and may have been used up to 5,000 years ago. Another fantastic find that can be found and digitally manipulated in our Lost & Found museum. The Digital Museum built by people, for people.
Find out more:
A complete indented beaker in New Forest colour-coat ware, recovered during excavations at the Winchester Hotel, Winchester.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from Headway; an organisation committed to helping adults who have sustained brain injury, and their families.
Follow the link below to read more about this artefact, about Headway as an organisation and manipulate the object in digital space.
www.wessexarch.co.uk/lost-and-found-headway-salisbury-and...
Found in a Late Neolithic pit in Bulford, Wiltshire this item is rare for the UK and one of the few that has an associated radio-carbon date - 2,950 BC. A worthy entrant into the Museum of the Lost and Found from the second public vote.
Find out more here:
A miner’s token from the Whitkirk branch of the West Yorkshire Miners Association. Mining tokens were originally issued by mining companies as a simple tally to count miners in and out of the mine, but later versions are stamped with the same information as an individual miner’s lamp so that the company knew exactly who was underground at any one time. This token is slightly different, as it has been issued by a Miners Association rather than mining company or colliery. Miners Associations issued membership badges to their paid-up members. The West Yorkshire Miners Association was founded in 1858 following a wage cut that saw many miners go on strike. After several decades of negotiation the West Yorkshire Miners Association merged with the South Yorkshire Miners Association in 1881 to form the Yorkshire Miners Association.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from the Sheffield Young Archaeologists Club, a group which aims to give its members, aged 8 to 16, as many opportunities to take part in ‘all things archaeological’ as possible.
To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
A fine wire slip-knot ring with banded, incised decoration. The ring is threaded with two beads; both are a semi-translucent medium blue. One of the beads is known as a “barrel bead” due to its shape. This item was recovered from the grave of a juvenile of around 10 – 11 years of age at Bulford, on Salisbury Plain. The cemetery where this young individual was buried was excavated by Wessex Archaeology in 2016, and is the largest early Anglo-Saxon cemetery known in Wiltshire.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from the Three Chequers Medical Practice, a GP surgery in central Salisbury which offers support to carers and ex-carers.
To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
www.wessexarch.co.uk/museum-lost-and-found
To learn more about our work at Bulford, follow this link:
A 14th century copper alloy seal matrix which was recovered from a site at Bedwin Street, Salisbury. The seal features a Lombardic legend around a heraldic shield featuring an animal – possibly a boar. The legend appears to read S’ P DEBREIYER ROG, which would mean that it was the seal of P DEBREIYER. This surname is either Anglo-Norman or French and may well be derived from the verb breier which means “to crush herbs in a mortar.” The letters ROG could be the beginning of a place name, or could refer to the Latin Rogator, a word sometimes used to denote a lawyer. This seal could therefore have belonged to a French heraldic gentleman, who came to Salisbury and lost his seal.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from ArtCare, the charitably funded arts in health service at Salisbury District Hospital.
To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
An 18th century crotal bell, made at the Robert Wells Foundry in Aldbourne, Wiltshire. Robert Wells was born in 1725 and founded the Wells foundry in 1755. The foundry was in operation under Robert, and later his sons Robert and James, until 1825, when sadly the business went bankrupt. Smaller versions of this bell would have been worn by horses and oxen, but a bell of this size is more likely to have been mounted on a cart or wagon, and would have helped to warn other road users of its approach. As well as producing 30 different sizes of crotal bell, the Wells foundry also produced church bells; an example of which, cast in 1792, still hangs at the church of St. John the Baptist in Pewsey.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from Wiltshire Centre for Independent Living, an organisation whose vision is for all disabled people to be able to live independently through individual choice, control and equal rights.
To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
A 19th- 20th century horse brass recovered from the site of a building to the rear of the Red Lion public house at Houghton Regis, Bedfordshire. Decoration on horse harness is known from when horses were first domesticated and worked in harness, and decorations often acted as talismans to ward off “the evil eye”. Horse brasses as we know them today were probably first introduced to Britain by Romanies who arrived in the 18th century, and soon became commonplace, being used by all classes of society from the gentry, who used brasses and harness fittings with their family crests, to the carters on the farms, to large companies, such as the railways and breweries who would use their company name or logo.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from Braidwood School for the Deaf, an 11-18 high school based in Birmingham.
To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
A 19th – 20th century stylised horse head fitting, probably the handle of a walking stick. Walking sticks are probably as old as humankind, and even gorillas in the wild have been observed using a branch as a walking aid. In the past a walking stick was often seen as a symbol of authority or even a weapon – Henry VIII was reportedly very fond of his walking stick, which featured spikes and concealed pistols, and is on display in the Tower of London. By the 1600s gentlemen had begun to carry a cane as part of their everyday dress instead of a sword. These canes became more ornate and less functional as time went on. In 1702 London started to require gentlemen to hold a walking stick licence to ensure proper etiquette was observed. Improper use – such as holding the stick under the arm – could mean that the licence was forfeit. In 1984 the British Stickmakers Guild was founded to preserve traditional manufacturing techniques.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from the Sheffield Young Archaeologists Club, a group which aims to give its members, aged 8 to 16, as many opportunities to take part in ‘all things archaeological’ as possible.
To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
Since late June 2020 Wessex Archaeology has run a collection of eight digital engagement sessions with community groups, NHS staff, young people and individuals across England, giving them behind the scenes access to our archives in Sheffield and Salisbury.
From these sessions each group was given the task of choosing two objects from a selection of four to go into our interactive digital museum. The chosen objects were then 3D scanned and uploaded in a way which presents the viewer with an opportunity to control, rotate, enlarge and closely examine the object allowing for greater access to each one. To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
This shale armlet was found in an Early-Middle Iron Age pit burial in Kent. The burial contained the remains of an adult aged between 35-45 years of age.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from Headway; an organisation committed to helping adults who have sustained brain injury, and their families.
Follow the link below to read more about this artefact, about Headway as an organisation and manipulate the object in digital space.
www.wessexarch.co.uk/lost-and-found-headway-salisbury-and...
Fragments of the gravestone of Mary Randall, recovered from a site on Endless Street in the Medieval City of Salisbury. The gravestone is made from limestone and its style conforms to that of the middle of the 18th century.
The inscription on the gravestone reads "Here Lieth the Body of Mary the Wife of Andrew Randall who died..." Unfortunately the key date information is missing.
This find was voted into our Lost and Found Museum by the Public following the premiere of our YouTube video in which Phil Harding presented 4 finds. To find out more and to see and manipulate the 3D scan in digital space follow the link below:
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo + Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
A fragment from a tapered hollow voussoir tile, recovered from a site near Amesbury. These hollow tiles would have been used in a vaulted roof, almost certainly in a bath house. These tiles would have sat on top of rectangular hollow tiles known as box-flue tiles and then crossed the gap between walls to form a vaulted ceiling. This would allow heat to circulate across the ceiling, to keep it warm, and to prevent condensation droplets falling on to the bathers below.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from Braidwood School for the Deaf, an 11-18 high school based in Birmingham.
To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
www.thingiverse.com/thing:110411
This is my first iteration of a 3D printed book. I have been meaning to work on this idea for a while - and with a new perspective on the summer - i have been able to find the time to develop it.
I have been thinking for some time how it would be nice to produce a book of textures and reliefs. To publish and distribute all the wonderful architectural patterning and decoration we enjoy here in Chicago and beyond.
The impetus for this project was a call for submissions from the Center for Book and Paper here in Chicago at Columbia College. The exhibition calls for both "print on demand" and "photographic" books. This "publication" is my response.
I think that - for now - the accordion style format is the most realistic. Although i would love to do some kind of traditionally bound book format - as a 3d printed object.
I also was wary of printing the whole thing in one go - it would easily have been a 80 - 100 hour print - and a lot could go wrong in that time span. After some experimentation with other connectors I prototyped a modular hinge and a modular surface that could be joined together with tbusers pins.
I chose six 3d scans scans from Thingiverse, three of my own and one each from Jason Bakutis / The Met, Pretty Small Things and AMinimal Studio. The scans - to my knowledge were (probably) all created with 123d Catch or another photogrammetry application.
The "front cover" explains how these reliefs were created, and has the Creative Commons License for the work. The "back cover" is a list of works. These two elements were created in Illustrator saved out as svg files, imported into tinkercad and extruded / booleaed with a Modular Surfaces.
This piece is very much a prototype. I am very happy with the Modular Hinge - and the Modular Surface - tbusers pins work wonderfully - i plan to use this combo on other art pieces soon. I am also interested about possibly stacking more of these to create columns, or making attachments to fix to a wall and make relief systems from them. The pages do not stack perfectly, i would rearrange the order perhaps as follows:
olmec, 2. boddhistiva, 3. mayan head, 4. lion, 5. emperor, 6. ogre
but as i had already made the list of works and i'm short on time this is what it is. also i think some kind of separator between the pages would have been good too.
To check out more of my artworks please visit: tomburtonwood.com
A toffee tin produced by Hoadley’s of Melbourne, recovered from the backfill of the junction of four First World War practice trenches at Larkhill. Abel Hoadley opened a jam factory in Melbourne in 1889 and by 1894 was selling a range of jam, sauces and confectionary. Hoadley’s first advertised toffees in 1912, and it is entirely possible that this tin of toffees was bought to England by one of the many Australian soldiers who came to Larkhill to train before being sent to France. Abel Hoadley died in 1918, and the Hoadley company continued; being acquired by Rowntree’s in 1970 and Nestlé in 1988.
This piece was selected for inclusion in our digital "Lost and Found Museum" by our participants and friends from Wiltshire Centre for Independent Living, an organisation whose vision is for all disabled people to be able to live independently through individual choice, control and equal rights.
To visit our online Museum of the Lost and Found, follow this link:
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo by Matt Christenson, BLM
Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo + Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo + Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
This model was made by 3D scanning a pillow with an ASUS XTION depth camera and combining it with the bunny’s 3D file.
The raw scan data was imported into Autodesk MeshMixer where it was made into a solid. The STL-file from the famous Stanford Bunny was then imported and scaled to size to fit on the pillow.
A boolean difference operation was used to make an impression from the bunny on the pillow. The hard edges where then smoothed with the sculpting tools.
Finally the ears of the bunny where modified with “soft transform” to make them rest naturally on the pillow.
MeshMixer was used to generate the support structure for the inclined bunny model.
You can download the model for free from: bit.ly/1lKD6YO
Sources:
- www.gvu.gatech.edu/people/faculty/greg.turk/bunny/bunny.html
- www.instructables.com/id/3D-printable-grip-and-lens-cover...
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo by Matt Christenson, BLM
Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo by Matt Christenson, BLM
Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo by Matt Christenson, BLM
Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Graphics + Photo by Matt Christenson, BLM
Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo + Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo + Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo by Matt Christenson, BLM
Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo + Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo by Matt Christenson, BLM
Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
Photos were captured at the Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory on the Oregon State University Campus in Corvallis, Dec. 13, 2016, to accompany the feature story below: "Printing the past: 3-D archaeology and the first Americans." Article online here (and below): goo.gl/viKEZF
Photo + Story by Toshio Suzuki, BLM
----------------------------------------
For the first Americans, and the study of them today, it all starts with a point.
A sharp point fastened to a wooden shaft gave the hunter 13,000 years ago a weapon that could single-handedly spear a fish or work in numbers to take down a mammoth.
For a prehistoric human, these points were the difference between life and death. They were hunger-driven, handmade labors of love that took hours to craft using a cacophony of rock-on-rock cracks, thuds and shatters.
They have been called the first American invention, and some archaeologists now think 3-D scanning points can reveal more information about both the technology and the people.
The Pacific Slope Archaeological Laboratory at Oregon State University takes up only a few rooms on the ground floor of Waldo Hall, one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
There are boxes of cultural history everywhere, and floor-to-ceiling wood cabinets with skinny pull-out drawers housing even more assets, but the really good stuff, evidence of the earliest known cultures in North America, lives in an 800-pound gun safe.
Loren Davis, anthropology professor at OSU and director of the lab, thinks 3-D scanning, printing, and publishing can circumvent the old traditions of the field, that artifacts are only to be experienced in museums and only handled by those who have a Ph.D.
“We are reimagining the idea of doing archaeology in a 21st century digital way,” said Davis. “We don’t do it just to make pretty pictures or print in plastic, we mostly want to capture and share it for analysis,” he added.
Nearby in the L-shaped lab, one of his doctoral students is preparing to scan a point that was discovered on Bureau of Land Management public lands in southeast Oregon.
Thousands of points have been unearthed since the 1930s in North America, the first being in eastern New Mexico near a town called Clovis. That name is now known worldwide as representing the continent’s first native people.
More recently, though, other peoples with distinctive points were found elsewhere, and some researchers think it means there was differing technology being made at the same time, if not pre-Clovis.
One such location is the Paisley Caves in southern Oregon ― one of the many archaeologically significant sites managed by the BLM.
The earliest stem point from Paisley Caves was scanned at Davis’ lab and a 3-D PDF was included in a 2012 multi-authored report in the journal Science.
Davis estimates his lab at OSU has scanned as many as 400 points, including others from BLM-managed lands in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
More scans would mean a bigger database for comparing points and determining what style they are.
“Ideally, we want to get as many artifacts scanned as possible,“ said Davis. “The BLM offers a lot of access to public data ― this is just another way of doing it.”
---
Transforming a brittle piece of volcanic glass, by hand, into a beautiful and deadly 4-inch-long spear point is a process.
In one hand would be a hard shaping rock, or maybe a thick section of antler, and in the other would be the starter stone, which in addition to igneous could be jasper, chert, or any other chippable rock that creates a hide-puncturing level of sharpness.
After what might be hundreds of controlled strokes and rock rotations, the rough shape of a lance or spear tip would take form. Discarded shards of stone would often result in more points, or other useful tools like scrapers and needles.
Clovis points are distinguished by their length, bifacial leaf shape and middle channels on the bottom called flutes. Eventually the repetitive flaking of the point would stop, and the hunter would use precise pressure points to create the flute on one or each side that likely helped slot the finished product into a spear-like wooden pole.
The hunter was now mobile and ready to roam.
---
Prior to 3-D scanning, OSU doctoral student Sean Carroll picks up a can of Tinactin, gives it the obligatory shake, and completely covers “one of the oldest technologies in North America” with antifungal spray.
The talc and alcohol from the athlete’s foot remedy helps the software see even the slightest indents in the point, and it rubs right off afterwards.
“I want to scan all the Clovis I can get my hands on,” said Carroll, who came to OSU because of Davis’ 3-D lab and is using the medium as a big part of his dissertation.
Two random items, a power plug adapter and a ball of clay, are placed on each side of the fluted point to give the camera and light projector perspective. The objects create margins that force the structured light patterns to bend and capture more of the point’s surface detail.
Even so, like the hunter rotating the shaping rock, the archaeologist has to rotate the foam square holding the three items. Each scan takes about six seconds.
Carroll and Davis estimate that the learning curve for this process was about 100 hours. One hundred hours of trial and error -- and a lot of watching YouTube videos -- for a finished product that they think is indisputably worth it.
A completed 3-D scan of a point will have about 40,000 data points per square inch. The measurements are so precise, they can determine the difference between flake marks as thin as a piece of paper.
Davis says no archaeologist with a pair of calipers can come close to measuring the data obtained via 3-D, because simply, “there are some jobs that robots are really good at.”
“If the end game is measurements, well you could spend your whole life with a pair of calipers trying to achieve what we can do in 10 minutes,” said Davis.
---
Last year, the famous human relative nicknamed Lucy had 3-D scans of her 3.2 million year old bones published in the journal Nature.
In 2015, archaeologists from Harvard University completed a 3-D scan of a winged and human-headed stone bull from Mesopotamia that stands 13 feet high at the Louvre Museum.
And the Smithsonian Institution is currently beta testing a website dedicated to publishing 3-D models from its massive collection, including molds of President Abraham Lincoln’s face and the entire Apollo 11 command module.
All of these new-school efforts are based upon the old-school scientific principles of preservation and promotion.
Rock points, fossils, hieroglyphics -- various forms of cultural assets are susceptible to environmental conditions and not guaranteed to be around forever. Three-dimensional scanning is the most accurate way to digitally preserve these items of merit.
Once accurate preservation is done, there are opportunities for promoting not just science, but specific research goals.
In the case of the Lucy bones, scientists hope that crowdsourcing the 3-D data will help get more experts to look at the fossils and prove that the tree-dwelling ape died from a fall.
When it comes to comparing one specific stemmed point to an entire hard drive of scanning data, BLM archaeologist Scott Thomas thinks the work being done at the OSU lab can move archaeology to a new level.
“The 3-D scanning method blows anything we have done out of the water,” said Thomas.
That ability to compare points can lead to insights on how these hunting tools moved over geography, and even expand theories about how native groups learned new technologies.
“It’s going to be a really powerful tool someday -- not too far off,” said Thomas.
While long-term data analysis may not be the sexiest form of archaeology, holding a 3-D printed stem point is a pretty cool educational tool.
Davis of OSU has incorporated 3-D prints into his classes and said his students are able to make a tactile connection with artifacts that otherwise are not available.
“The students really enjoy these printed and digital models and often say that they are almost like the real thing,” said Davis.
---
This spring, Davis is traveling to Magadan, Russia -- aka Siberia -- to inspect and scan some points that may be linked to Clovis peoples.
The goal in Siberia, of course, is to further expand the 3-D database. He is specifically interested in comparing them to stems from a BLM-managed site he excavated in Idaho called Cooper’s Ferry.
As his student, Carroll, begins to clean up and put the scanned points into their individually labeled ziplocked bags, Davis can’t help but mention how much easier international research could be with 3-D scanning.
“You can share cultural resource info with people in other countries and you don’t have to come visit,” he said, adding that Russia isn’t the easiest country to enter.
“It’s as easy as sending an email,” Carroll agreed.
Davis then mentioned his 11-year-old child and how much of school curriculum these days is web-based as opposed to text-based.
“There’s nothing wrong with books, I’m a huge fan of books, but it’s a different way of learning,” said the archaeology professor.
And with that, he made another point.
-- by Toshio Suzuki, tsuzuki@blm.gov, @toshjohn
Best places to find 3-D archaeology online:
-- Sketchfab.com is one of the biggest databases on the web for 3-D models of cultural assets. Institutions and academics alike are moving priceless treasures to the digital space for all to inspect. Two examples: via the British Museum, a 7.25-ton statue of Ramesses II is available for viewing and free download; and via archaeologist Robert Selden Jr., hundreds of 3-D models are open to the public for study, including several Clovis points from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Site in New Mexico.
-- The Smithsonian Institution is bringing the best of American history to a new audience via their 3-D website (3d.si.edu). Amelia Earhart's flight suit? Check. Native American ceremonial killer whale hat? Check. Face cast of President Abraham Lincoln? Check and check -- there are two. And their biggest 3-D scan is still coming: the 184-foot-long space shuttle Discovery.
-- Visitors to Africanfossils.org can filter 3-D model searches by hominids, animals and tools, and also by date, from zero to 25 million years ago.
The sleek website, with partners like National Geographic and the National Museums of Kenya, makes it easy to download or share 3-D scans, and each item even comes with a discovery backstory and Google map pinpointing exactly where it was found.
High resolution 3D scan of a real human skull
Software: Agisoft Photoscan, 3ds Max + VRay
Images used for 3D reconstruction of the skull: 1.767
Images used for texturing: 653
• 3D Models for sale at TurboSquid: www.turbosquid.com/Search/Artists/ibl3d?referral=ibl3d
This image is for the non-commercial use of UBC faculties and units only. For non-UBC use please contact comm.marketing@ubc.ca. Please credit photo to “Don Erhardt / UBC Brand & Marketing”
This model was made by 3D scanning a pillow with an ASUS XTION depth camera and combining it with the bunny’s 3D file.
The raw scan data was imported into Autodesk MeshMixer where it was made into a solid. The STL-file from the famous Stanford Bunny was then imported and scaled to size to fit on the pillow.
A boolean difference operation was used to make an impression from the bunny on the pillow. The hard edges where then smoothed with the sculpting tools.
Finally the ears of the bunny where modified with “soft transform” to make them rest naturally on the pillow.
MeshMixer was used to generate the support structure for the inclined bunny model.
You can download the model for free from: bit.ly/1lKD6YO
Sources:
- www.gvu.gatech.edu/people/faculty/greg.turk/bunny/bunny.html
- www.instructables.com/id/3D-printable-grip-and-lens-cover...
This model was made by 3D scanning a pillow with an ASUS XTION depth camera and combining it with the bunny’s 3D file.
The raw scan data was imported into Autodesk MeshMixer where it was made into a solid. The STL-file from the famous Stanford Bunny was then imported and scaled to size to fit on the pillow.
A boolean difference operation was used to make an impression from the bunny on the pillow. The hard edges where then smoothed with the sculpting tools.
Finally the ears of the bunny where modified with “soft transform” to make them rest naturally on the pillow.
MeshMixer was used to generate the support structure for the inclined bunny model.
You can download the model for free from: bit.ly/1lKD6YO
Sources:
- www.gvu.gatech.edu/people/faculty/greg.turk/bunny/bunny.html
- www.instructables.com/id/3D-printable-grip-and-lens-cover...
This model was made by 3D scanning a pillow with an ASUS XTION depth camera and combining it with the bunny’s 3D file.
The raw scan data was imported into Autodesk MeshMixer where it was made into a solid. The STL-file from the famous Stanford Bunny was then imported and scaled to size to fit on the pillow.
A boolean difference operation was used to make an impression from the bunny on the pillow. The hard edges where then smoothed with the sculpting tools.
Finally the ears of the bunny where modified with “soft transform” to make them rest naturally on the pillow.
MeshMixer was used to generate the support structure for the inclined bunny model.
You can download the model for free from: bit.ly/1lKD6YO
Sources:
- www.gvu.gatech.edu/people/faculty/greg.turk/bunny/bunny.html
- www.instructables.com/id/3D-printable-grip-and-lens-cover...
Processing GUI I've started working on at the workshop. The sketch neatly thickens and crops meshes using HE_Mesh by Frederik Vanhoutte.
--------------------------------------
tSet();
tPot(); tCup();
A tea set is created by sampling and remixing existing objects using 3D scanning from photographs (via hypr3D.com) and a custom made Processing sketch that works as an interface to manipulate meshes and create ready-to-print files.
The process is an alternative partcipatory approach to product consumption that exploits emerging technologies to make it possible for people to copy, modify and fabricate objects to their own taste.
A project developed during the Generator.x 3.0 workshop organised by Marius Watz at iMal.
A hands-on scanning practical, using a kinect-style sensor and the in-house NextEngine laser scanner. Using open source and free software to scan your objects and prepare them for 3D printing. Scanning both small objects (no larger than a football) and humans, all participants left with a 3D digital model, ready for virtual reality applications, 3D printing or other computer controlled making techniques. This session was led by Jan Boehm and Mona Hess of UCL's Photogrammetry, 3D Imaging and Metrology Research Centre. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy7muFzA1e0&feature=youtu.be More information on their 3D scan of Jeremy Bentham: uclgeomatics.com/2012/11/09/jeremy-bentham-in-3d/