![]() Of course, I can’t say enough about how 3D printed artifacts help with our public outreach efforts and those of our partners in archaeological education and in the cultural heritage community. I teach an archaeological methods class in the spring, and having multiple sets of identical objects allows me to divide my relatively large class into smaller groups, and ensure that each group has replicas of the same items from which to learn–even if the color might vary depending on what was in the printer on a given day. In my own teaching, 3D printed artifacts are quite useful for exposing students to the diversity of the human past–with replicas that I can pass around, sometimes of items that they see in their readings. We are also considering the next generations. Our 3D printing of archaeological findings is not confined to meeting the needs of established researchers or professional archaeologists. Right now, in the Virtual Curation Laboratory, we are generating diagnostic type collections of diagnostic chipped stone tools and animal remains, the latter of particular interest to zooarchaeologists. The 3D printed type collection is relatively light as well, and can be tossed into an archaeologists dig kit, and modified and expanded relatively inexpensively. With a 3D printed artifact model, a “type” can be directly compared to the archaeological finding on hand. Even with the addition of an English/metric scale to a virtual artifact model, the sense of size maybe skewed, especially depending on whether we are viewing the virtual artifact model on a smartphone, tablet, or as a two-story projection. Some of our ways of identifying our findings involves comparison to what has been discovered before–no surprise there–and, while digital avatars are useful for exploring the all important attribute of shape, it is sometimes difficult to get at the equally important attribute of shape. ![]() Partially this has to do with the nature of archaeology. Essentially, I find that almost as fast as I move archaeological findings from sites hundreds if not thousands of years or even hundreds of thousands of years old from a material into a virtual existence that I am moving them back into material forms via the power of 3D printing. 2013a,b, 2014a,b,c,d), so I will only add a few words on this issue here. I and my students have explored the need for the tangible elsewhere (McCuistion 2013 Means et al. Mark Summers at Jamestown with printed replica of butchered dog mandible. Simply put, we should not underestimate the power of touch (Pye 2007). While seeing a projected two-story tall rotating image of a 3D scanned and butchered dog mandible from the “Starving Times” at Jamestown is pretty impressive, this is still not quite as satisfying as holding an accurately printed and painted scale model in your hands. However, it quickly became readily apparent to myself and the undergraduate VCU students making our virtual project a reality, that digital models of artifacts are not as wholly satisfying as touching something tangible. The basic goal of our nascent laboratory was to make digital diagnostic artifact type collections to help archaeologists more readily identify their findings, with a secondary goal of virtually preserving items that are fragile or otherwise subject to the ravages of time. I should add that, when I began the Virtual Curation Laboratory three years ago (and counting), I thought I would solely be moving material items into virtual worlds (Means et al. I know that the free exchange of ideas tomorrow will expand my perspectives, and give me solutions to problems that I might not even know that I have. I thought I’d share here briefly my perspective on the virtual/material duality, without getting too much ahead of myself. More on my fellow panelists can be found here. Our moderator will be Andrew Illnicki, Director of Academic Technology in the VCU School of the Arts. I was invited by VCU Humanities Research Librarian John Glover to discuss the intersection between the virtual and material worlds, via 3D printing and digital models I will be joined as a panelist by Courtney Freeman, who is leading the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s (VMFA) 3D printing project for the VMFA’s exhibit Forbidden City: Imperial Treasures from the Palace Museum, Beijing, and Diane Harnish of Primal Pictures, a leading 3D anatomy company. Tomorrow on Wednesday, December 3, 2014, I will participate as a panelist in the Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) Digital Pragmata panel “Virtual/Material” in the Cabell Library Room 250 at noon.
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