Archaeology Abridged: Preserving Underwater Maya Finds using 3D Technology with Heather McKillop

okay let's get started hello everyone welcome to archaeology abridged i'm ben thomas aia's director of programs uh just before we get to heather and our presentation for this afternoon just a couple things to remind you of um one sec let me just get this organized here um we are recording this event and we will make it available uh on you on our youtube channel uh in the next couple days once it's processed once we downloaded and processed it but we please ask that no one make any personal recordings of the presentation we're going to uh follow this talk with some time for questions and answers so please put your questions in the q a box and not in the chat window there's a lot of messages that are going to come in the chat window and your question may get lost so actually just put it in the q a box we'll monitor that and we will uh ask your questions we'll ask heather your questions at the end of the presentation so heather's going to speak for a little while and then we'll have a decent amount of time for q a then just a final note you know these programs just uh all our programs all aia programs are supported by our members and donors so if you're interested in supporting aia please visit us at archaeological.org donate and if you want to become a member please go to archaeological.org join okay we are joined today by heather mckillip heather is uh heather has been working in the maya area and in belize since about 1979. her work has focused on the ancient maya economy and on salt heather's interested in how salt was produced how the labor for salt production was organized and how the needs of the inland maya were supplied by these coastal salt works she has focused on the payne's creek saltworks in belize since the 2004 discovery of the only known ancient maya canoe battle and wooden buildings preserved in mangrove peat below the seafloor a project for which he received an aia site preservation grant to help with the preservation of the site of the artifacts so we'll hear a little bit about these incredible discoveries today uh and we'll also hear uh quite a bit about her work with uh the preservation and conservation of the wooden artifacts and how she's using 3d technology uh as a means of conservation and as also as a means of education and outreach so that's what i think heather will be focusing on today her work uh with her 3d imaging lab heather is the thomas and lillian landrum alumni professor the department of geography and anthropology at lsu she is a 2020 recipient of the research master award in the humanities and social sciences at lsu her publications include my assault works in search of maya ctraders and salt white gold of the ancient maya she was interviewed on npr science friday for her work with salt production and the link is actually on our website her current national science foundation grant with dr e corey sills will support the excavation of multiple buildings at large underwater sites to identify salt kitchens residences and the organization of production heather welcome and thank you for joining us today oh thank you ben also one more thing for all the listeners out there heather is actually joining us from belize so she is in the field finally after a couple years of not being able to go uh and took the time to travel to the closest city with his internet uh and is logging in uh from belize so heather i'm going to stop sharing my screen and i'm going to put it over to you okay all set thank you very much ben for that nice introduction and uh also to the aia in general for giving me this wonderful opportunity to talk to you today from the bustling hub of the toledo district belize punta gorda where our entire field team came from the jungle where we've been for the last three weeks without anyone else to get more food and have rnr and yes i'm in our guest house here in punta gorda with wireless internet which we haven't had also so uh we're currently uh in the field i've got a nsf grant with uh my colleague and former student dr corey sills and uh i've got a slide at the end and uh you can see what we're what we're returning to tomorrow my talk preserving underwater maya fines using 3d technology i gave a overview of the project talking about salt and our excavation techniques in april and at that time it really i really didn't think we'd be coming to the field and i i'm just so happy and my students and my colleague dr sills and i are very happy to be back here it's such a relief and to be able to continue our research i can direct you to our website underwatermaya.com which you can see on your cell phone or on on the internet we'll be updating it today i'm really going to focus on the uh the digital preservation of the waterlogged fines and focusing on what we've been doing in the lsu diva lab digital imaging and visualization and archaeology so i'll start here with um as ben said in 2004 we discovered wood was preserved the red mangrove peat deposited as sea level rose since the last ice age has preserved ancient maya wooden buildings in payne's creek national park which is in southern belize this is a large saltwater lagoon system in a classic mangrove ecosystem which is largely untouched since the classic maya this is one of the the world's best fly fishing areas but apart from that very few people go out there and in fact we haven't seen uh more than a couple of fly fishing boats in the distance since we've been out in the park for the last three weeks you can see here we're out on our research flotation devices with our portable research station and you can see it the inserts show what appears to be some wood but these are a date to the classic period and they are perfectly preserved the sharpened ends of the posts were stuck in the ground when the buildings were built the problem is there's waterlogged not only waterlogged but they're saltwater locked and as soon as you bring them out of the water they begin to shrink and decay and turn color and it's a conservation nightmare that we've been dealing with and we figured out a variety of ways to to work for our particular situation so what about the wood the thing about wood for the tropics is that it normally decays in the tropical landscape of maya sites so many of you are familiar with this image of tikal with the stone buildings that rise above the forest canopy and typical of most public archaeological sites in belize and elsewhere in the maya area what you see are the stone buildings however poland thatch structures were likely common etical according to william havilland who studied the architecture at the site the non-elite architecture such as at the modern maya community of san pedro colombia shown here with paul and thatch buildings and here the only stone building was a church a recent catholic church so none of this would preserve archaeologically and so think about as havilan said you know most of the buildings were pulled and thatched for houses for storage for workshops and and kitchens detached from houses and other purposes so although we have the mounted remains of many of these pull and class structures even more as archaeologists have found in the my area leave no mounded remains and they are invisible in in the modern landscape and what we found is such buildings that are preserved below the seafloor and are invisible above the water if you go to payne's creek national park you're not going to see the wooden buildings they're very difficult to find even after i we excavated three underwater sites and i published salt white gold of the ancient maya we hadn't seen any of the wooden post because they're not supposed to be there and so we weren't looking for them which is really a comment on conducting science you know we we are focused on what we what we know so how do you find out new information uh but here we are at tom new this is in 2008 there's my boat driver still going strong we'll be out there tomorrow with john young from punta gorda this is a shallow underwater site and the flags mark the red flags mark wooden posts and the letter flags mark diagnostic artifacts which we piece plotted individually using a total station because we can't see the sights uh until really we put it on a gis map so here's a vertical hardwood post flagged underwater with the wire flag and some artifacts flag that we we mapped later there's dr sills and some others here's some flags i have lots of movies of fluttering flags here's horizontal palmetto palm post a horizontal hardwood post we've mapped all these things and they're remarkably preserved in the mangrove pied some of these were covered with silt and we've uncovered for the photos so this is what we found lake classic wooden buildings the lake classic is ad600 to 800 the terminal classic is 800 to 900 so most of our buildings date from the late and terminal classic and these wooden posts with their sharpened ends define the outlines of buildings poland thoughts structures by their wooden posts and there's lots of other construction wood including horizontal beams and horizontal palmetto posts on a good day this you might be able to see this from above you can see the posts barely protruding from the sea floor but they decay as soon as they hit the sea floor so we have mapped 4042 posts individually to the center of the post we've measured the posts we've excavated very few we did excavate some and you can see the fresh sharpened end we have not mapped sites at an additional 30 sites because they were in water that was too deep or too too remote to to map using a total station and here you see a 3d digital scan of one of the posts we have 2439 vertical hardwood posts fourteen hundred and eighty two vertical palmetto compost these more usually defined the edges of sites they may have been land retaining but they certainly defined the edge of the yard for salt works because we find artifacts inside and firm ground inside but beyond it no artifacts and very silty soil so almost mounded hard areas we have 16 horizontal palmetto compost 32 horizontal hardwood posts that were mapped but many more that weren't mapped and wedges at some of our sites here's an overview gis of three areas of the lagoon system the brown marks mapped posts the green marks horizontal hardwoods and the black is palmetto pompous you really can't see it but if you look at this insert map you can see here's the lagoon system and you can see different areas of the lagoon why the lagoon why not in the sea why not at well kaneki this classic post-classic maya training board seasonally in the dry season this is like a natural solar evaporation pond that the coastal lagoon is salt water and the um the water is seasonally hyper saline in the dry season which we have just arrived at the dry season right now doing our excavations so it's it wouldn't require as much firewood to boil the brine and pots horrifiers in some of these wooden buildings what we're currently doing in our field work dr sills and i in our new nsf project is excavating a variety of different structures to look at the organization of labor product labor in in the production of salt to see salt works residences and we have an article from 2021 in ancient mesoamerica that you can look up for free online to get the details of equinol the site that we're excavating now which is up in here so here's a gis map that's a geographic information system it's just a computer map showing a building this is building 75 and it shows the larger posts the turquoise ones on my map they're not actually turquoise in the corners and they would be like these pole and thatch structures and this photo is from the robert west some of you know the name robert west or should know photo courtesy of the lsu cartographic information center in our department and john anderson the map librarian and here's another photo here's the map and here's a 3d gis based on our 2d gis from geomedia intergraph gis and here's a [Music] walk through of the lagoon it's all underwater but if it had been dry land uh dr terrance weinmiller copiah in a former grant and you can see uh the post and he's overlaying some uh thatch on some of the structures we also found the first ancient maya canoe paddle uh at the kaknob site site 14 in 2004 and it's made from sapodilla which is the chewing gum wood and it's radiocarbon dated to 680 to 880 ad and it created a lot of problems first of all we found it photographed as you see the hands holding it above the water and then we put it back and and and held it down in the mangrove peat because as soon as we took it out of the water it started to decay and you can see the edges were warming and as we found out later that it was broken off here and it was actually on two sides it was not like the canoe paddlers on the burial 116 uh bone carvings at temple one and t call it actually had a blade on both sides but these canoe paddlers you cannot paddle a canoe like holding a paddle like this but they were not paddling an ordinary canoe these were the jaguar paddler god and the stingray paddler god at the bow and the stern of this bone carving boat and they were paddling in the sky they were in a different world not in in the open sea so we put it back until i knew we could get an export permit to conserve it professionally at texas a m using the modern polymer process and we later returned it to belize where it's in the museum of belize unfortunately in storage but we also gave them a 3d printed replica for um for sharing so the salt water lodged wood and pottery created a conservation nightmare because not only with the wood when you bring it out of the water the wood structure deteriorates and distorts and if you want to submit it for radiocarbon samples that's fine but if you want to identify the wood species you have to keep it wet and you also have to desalinate it because you've got salt crystals that dry and come to the surface and crack and expand the wood so that was a problem and you think okay the wood the wood's one thing but what about the pottery the same thing with the pottery with if you take pottery out of the salt water environment then it dries out and the salt comes to the surface and the crystals expand and exfoliate and crack off the exterior of for example an ocarina a figurine whistle or the surface of belize red pottery for those minus who might be listening um and so we had to keep everything that we took out that we thought we might want to do some more analysis with or take measurements of or photographs we keep them in ziploc plastic bags full of water and then start the desalination process one of my doctoral students holly lincoln is currently doing desalination in the field because we she did it in the lab and discovered things desalinate pretty quickly at least the pottery so we've got things on a cycle we can desalinate by rinsing in fresh water bass and then finally take them out and then let them dry the wood we keep wet and we kept wood wet since 2006 and seven sampling of wood and we continue to work with it very grateful for that because during covid uh dr sills and i submitted radiocarbon samples from equinol that were in the lab that we collected in 2007 for radiocarbon dating in 2020 and 21 to for our article on the seafloor survey at equinol and we found a from our hms america article that the buildings date to different time periods even though they appeared from the sea floor to be dated at the same time it's a multi-component site with four phases of occupation from the lake classic through the terminal classic which makes it a lot more exciting and interesting so with the problems with conservation i decided we needed to um i wanted to start a 3d lab so in 2009 i applied for a grant which i got to start in 2010 we started the diva lab digital imaging and visualization archaeology lab with a grant from the louisiana board of regents the goals initially were to digitally preserve the waterlogged wood and pottery from the underwater maya project the subsequent goals were 3d printing for exhibits such as the aia site preservation grant where we had as i mentioned we did two exhibits in different locations each time permanent exhibits in belize to try to incorporate the information from our project into the local community to promote preservation and we also did outreach in belize and in louisiana and then our third goal is for teaching i've started in 2015 teaching 3d digital imaging mainly for undergraduates and this past spring before we came to belize i started a new graduate class advanced 3d archaeology and training the next generation and learning myself the initial hardware we had were three next engine desktop scanners which are wonderful scanners we brought them to belize we've worked up them off of the generator we also had a creon laser with a attached to a microscribe arm and that is very detailed but doesn't have color and with the grant i got a dimensionally 3d printer a huge heavy-duty expensive printer that prints an abs plus plastic at various scales of resolution we printed the canoe paddle solid it took a full week to print it in pieces and put it together software we've used in addition to the proprietary software that comes with the various hardware we've used rhino i've got a student here who's going to do some rhino with our artifacts that we're getting out from our field work this time mesh lab which is open source which is nice netfabb photogrammetry we've used photoscan and we've got this really cool software you can use on your iphone called scandi and some other softwares the new hardware that we're using we got a photorealistic 3d color gypsum printer which has weight to it so the artifacts have weight funded by the lsu college of humanities and social science it's very exciting the problem with that is it's not as stable and and durable as abs plus plastic which you can drop on the floor we paint and it's very good for outreach and for exhibits um the new hardware we got in 2019 uh corey souza and i with our grant we bought an artec space fighter which is fast and higher resolution and we're using it currently in the field one of my doctoral students share foster has been on 3d scanning using the rtec and it's really quick and wonderful new hardware which we got a grant for i learned in belize will be purchasing and using it for teaching is an artic eva and a leo which uh will scan larger things like a car or a mound and very portable so we're excited about that there's a photorealistic gypsum print there's photogrammetry some research in the lab and my teaching my class if you go to our website you can see more images of these things here's uh roberto one of my uh master's students who started with me in the diva lab we started in a tiny room with no windows and we've expanded to a huge complex and filled it up and he's now dr roberto rosado and here he is with the creon laser and the microscope arm which biological anthropologists use it to take points to measure skeletal material and there's the canoe paddle after we got it back uh they lost a piece of it here um what we found which was really alarming at first was that despite conservation the canoe paddle continued to deteriorate i called our our conservation colleagues c wayne smith from texas a m they were coming over to louisiana i said the canoe paddle is cracking what do we do and they came over and they said the cracks were formed in antiquity probably from alternate drying and and and getting wet and it's good it's going to continue to crack and they gave us some crazy glue and an exacto knife which i also gave to the government of belize um they said just fill it in fill in the holes and i realized at that point and this is really the key for our research is the 3d scan becomes the enduring record despite professional conservation by the polymer process this is an open of openly available patented process that you can set up in your lab the wood is beautiful and it doesn't need humidity or temperature control but whatever was going on the cracks will continue here we had a ct scan of the paddle courtesy of women's hospital in baton rouge and you can see the worm holes here and the cracks and the edges it's actually exfoliating from the exterior so our 3d scans need to be really accurate we strive for a high accuracy and then sometimes we print things and we can print things for research purposes to do measurements and we can re 3d print not at high resolution for teaching or for exhibits and we can print larger we can make small things larger and print them larger so people can see them more easily in the 3d exhibit as corey sells and i did with the aia site preservation grant and we can print things smaller like the canoe paddle but we do not print the canoe paddles smaller because we'd like to print it it is full four foot seven inch size uh here are some 3d replicas of the canoe paddle as well as the original conserve canoe paddle here is one cnc that's commun a computer numerical control i now have a piece of sappadillawood that we're going to uh mill in lsu [Music] engineering department mechanical engineering this was a test front of the blade only this in cyprus but we've got sappadilla here is uh the 3d print in abs plus plastic this part took 24 hours to print solid but we can print the exterior solid and then the interior more like a honeycomb and doesn't take as much time or material which is cost here it is painted and here's what i'm going to talk about next we um i got a colleague who's a woodworker also a word worker he's written books with his wife a 3d a carved actual replica of what i think the paddle would have looked like uh out of sapodilla uh and we we had with the aia site preservation grant in 2013 we had an official opening of the 3d printed canoe paddle in here you see it in an exhibit and there was a formal opening in belize at the tourism information center in punta gorda with the national anthem um an emcee paul mahong reporting from love fm and we welcomed people to come and we gave talks and we had it a catered event and it is a permanent display although the tourism information center is currently closed because of covid and then before i gave the canoe paddle back we had a viewing the first public viewing in punta gorda and people had an opportunity to hold the actual canoe paddle and take photos with it and learned about conservation um then it was returned to the institute of archaeology conserved and this one remains in puente gorda and there's a 3d printed replica given to the government as well i thought it was interesting that people have told me when they visited they visited the exhibit and they've seen the canoe paddle and i said oh you saw a 3d printed replica and they say no we saw the paddle and there's no way that i can dissuade them from the fact that it was only a 3d print and then i started thinking that well it's an accurate 3d print so what is real since we aim to have it an exact replica and i'll just leave that for your thought i've talked to my colleagues at the smithsonian who've had the same issue with doing 3d prints of northwest coast wooden ceremonial hats which were then used by the indigenous population in ceremonies and regarded as real so i think it's a very interesting way to preserve and protect and promote the past in many ways so then my colleague kirby salisbury the woodworker and word worker look him up he's written books um we did experimental archaeology uh i worked with him he didn't like our drawing i had to do it in a different way so he i spent a week and we took the finished canoe paddle for a paddle in joe taylor creek in belize and it it's great now it's got a very small blade and a long shaft well that's great if you want to paddle long distance you're not going to get tired and but it's heavy it's really heavy but if you're using a stroke where you turn you don't take the blade out of the water you just turn it and bring it back the water supports the weight of the the canoe paddle so it's a great one for sea travel long distances which is probably what they were doing with it transporting loads of salt cakes along the coast and up the rivers to le bantung and selling them in a regional markets uh to or trading them for other things uh we do 3d scanning of artifacts in belize as i mentioned first with the next engine and now with the artec space fighter there's dr sills we scanned the um a little boat model which you can see is small and you can see it on the screen and then here's dr sills and now a former undergraduate now dr taylor oakland and then we take the 3d scan and print them back at lsu and print them different sizes i think a really important thing for us is that 3d imaging is useful for research in foreign countries where you can't export material we're very fortunate to be able to export material for research purposes under temporary export premises from the government of police but many places you can't it's also 3d scanning is ideal for fragile or waterlogged artifacts where you need to scan them close to their excavation or discovery point and i point out that we're using the next engine here and now the rtec uh powered from um a generator gas powered generator in the jungle with no other facilities around we um had uh very excited to have an archaeological institute of america's site preservation grant and i worked on it with my former student cory sills now dr sales now a co-pi on their nsf grant and we put on an exhibit at the tourism information center with posters and 3d printed replicas we had cases made and this is a permanent exhibit we also put one uh at the ranger station in pains creek national park because the marine tour guide said if you put an exhibit at the ranger station people will have to hire us to take them out to see it so we did different ones at the ranger station at payne's creek national park uh there's our boat driver john young here's roberto the former head of the btia belize tourism industry association that is in charge of this tourism information center unfortunately as i said now closed because of covid but here's the really exciting thing that we found with the 3d printed replicas there's no monetary value on the international antiquities market so these um people aren't going to buy and sell them now we make some nice things we don't sell them we don't produce things for sale but these have no value like real artifacts and they don't require government permission to have artifacts on loan everything we do of course with these exhibits i discuss with and get approval from the institute of archaeology and belize so we're not going to go and do these without their knowledge but what it does it makes artifacts or 3d printed replicas accessible to a wider public audience and so the the descendants of the ancient maya who live you know in in belize and elsewhere the um the people of punta gorda and other people tourists who come not many tourists come to punta gorda but they should it's a lovely place they have access to this material and they can see it tangibly and we have plans in our grant to do another exhibit or two but at the moment um that's not possible uh and i'll just say in closing that um we're currently doing field work we're going back tomorrow to the lagoon and we'll be continuing our nsf grand labor relations in the traditional complex society 2018-2023 it's a three-year grant but we had to get two extensions year one was at top nuke not in 2019 and year two is currently underway back to lagoon tomorrow we've submitted an aia session with our graduate students for the 2023 aia conference so maybe you're you'll um be able to attend and and hear the details uh from our our students and from uh dr seals and me then so i think i've spoken long enough i just see my time is a little i've talked for half an hour so i return this back to uh to ben thank you thank you heather um we have about 20 23 minutes for questions and there are uh quite a few of them and i've tried to sort of sort them by by theme or topic so let's just start quickly uh with a general question about salt saltworks how ex and this is a multi-part question heather how extensive are the saltworks along the bohesian coast where is the salt going what is it used for and do the maya have preferences for salt product produced in different areas okay well i didn't really talk about salt this time because i've talked a little bit before and i really wanted to talk more about the um the preservation and the digital imaging uh because that's what that's what you guys asked me to talk about yeah sure but just a very quick kind of like nice salt works um are very extensive and i've done some calculations that are in my my assault works book about um the production levels at the payne's creek saltworks based on uh the modern or historic production in at inland salt works with by salt springs in the highlands of guatemala places like saca pulas where reina and monaghan in 1981 in an article in expedition you can look up and it's a very detailed ethnographic account of family owned saltworks where the people live in houses and they have salt works nearby talk kitchens and i use their production estimates um to give production estimates for the payne's creek saltworks before i get i just say we will i believe that in general based on our production and the production at uh other salt works along the coast of belize that are also submerged many of them uh all along the coast of lease and then uh solar evaporation along the coast of the yucatan where it's much drier this the so-called dry season in southern belize happens maybe after easter but we had rain in may and we're going to get more rain here this is the rain forest and maybe one reason why tourists aren't really flocking here but it's a beautiful area but it was regional all the way around and so for our area for payne's creek saltworks they were supplying dietary salt as well as using the salt to [Music] preserve uh fish and maybe meat and we know that because the mangrove peat has not preserved anything with calcium carbonate in it which would be limes crushed limestone temper and pottery is all eaten away and any kind of bone so no animal bone or fish bone uh very little has been preserved anywhere and so uh but we found from uh useware analysis by kazuo ioama and there's a link to to my talk and you can it's there's an open access article in pnas that you can you can read he found that most of the artifacts about 80 percent of the art of stone tools the church stone tools were used for cutting fish or meat or for scraping hide or for scraping fish and this was really surprising to me because i thought most of them would be used for sharping those posts and for woodworking for the canoe paddle and the other wooden artifacts that we've found but that's certainly not the case and so um i think uh both for dietary salt certainly lots of salt even if half the salt produced was at payne's creek was was dietary and half was for preserving fish both salted fish and salt cakes and we've done estimates of the volume based on ethnographic evidence we're traded inland and this is really a model with the wooden architecture in the salt kitchens for elsewhere along the coast of belize where the wooden architecture hasn't preserved has not preserved but you have the salt making artifacts that were used the pots and pot likes etc for boiling the brine and pots over fires in salt kitchens just like at sacopolis okay so that yeah i just i think people just want the context of the salt and why salt but um okay so some 3d uh questions 3d printing questions and 3d lab questions uh we have questions from folks who are well one of the questions which i thought was interesting was are there any to make any of the 3d files or other material available online via a sort of open access policy or if not what are the obstacles to that uh yes we're um we're gonna certainly that's um a goal right now we've looked into various ways to first of all on our website underwatermaya.com we've put little movies we've put images we've put rotating 3d scans we haven't put the 3d files but certainly um with our nsf grant we want to be able to share the actual um files and so and there's various ways to do that um at certainly at a lower resolution because some of our files are enormous because of we we save things at various levels for research for teaching and for public display and so we've looked into various formats for actually posting them and making them available to people who want to download them and we've also consulted with um we're planning on making teacher kits and making things available for schools so a lot of schools now have 3d printers but the question is where do you get the files to print and a 3d print is only as good as its 3d scan and so you know we want to make accurate good 3d scans available that's a that's a goal but we're not there yet and heather can you mention the website again oh yeah the web our website is www.underwatermaya.com

underwater maya lower case all one word all put together and we'll be updating it we also have a facebook page uh called diva lab and it's much easier to post things so there's more recent things that are posted there including some 3d scans do you so next question do you have any issues with printing large artifacts you have to do them in pieces and if you do them in pieces how do you adhere it all together initially in 2010 when we started the um when we got the grant and started scanning and printing it was a big issue with how are we going to print the canoe paddle because our the the area we could print was relatively small even with this huge 3d printer and so uh and we got the people from the software people came and for the printer and there was you know we actually used other software to cut it in to cut the canoe paddle into pieces now there's software embedded in the 3d printing software that you can do it with so we uh we print the kind of a jagged line instead of cutting straight across we slice like the canoe paddles four foot seven that's not going to fit we print it in pieces and then you know sort of have a peg and one and a hole in the other to join them together we use crazy glue and then we use putty to smooth out anything before we uh before we paint them okay so uh the technology and the software for printing big things has come a long way so printing big things is not a problem okay um and then um speaking of big things uh a question we have a person who's actually working on 3d reconstruction of gulf coast dugout canoe and they were wondering about uh if if there was going to be possibly a reconstruction of a maya dagar canoe from the pieces that you have found from the piece that you found uh and if so do you have any tips on how you could reconstruct uh the canoe itself yeah our uh we have uh we got a colleague uh from lsu art design to uh to come down with us one year to with his 3d scanner which is better than the next engine and could work outside uh to 3d scan the the pieces uh the canoe paddle sorry the canoe that we found at the eleanor betty site um we found it and then we pulled it up um it was preserved in deep silt in between two lines of posts held up by pegs and was over top of a funnel a clay funnel just like at sacopolis where they enriched the brine by pouring salty water over it and so it was a repurposed old canoe but we pulled it up and and put it down several times before we really i really thought maybe it's a real canoe because what's the difference between a dugout canoe and an old log that's kind of hollowed out um so the first thing we did was get a radiocarbon date and it came back as early classic an early classic date and at that point i realized okay now we need to go and excavate it but by the time we did um it had broken apart yeah and so it was in pieces and we don't have the full size and we can't really reconstruct it and certainly the pieces that um my colleague got scanned don't fit something real we're so we're hoping i think there's been a small canoe that's been found i know uh by the mexican uh archaeologists in the yucatan so they could use uh what we're getting in the fall for teaching purposes and our tech leo so we may be able to bring that to belize to scan big things and work outside a leo artec leo has a built-in uh 3d it's got the screen and you can just use it outside so my colleagues in the on the gulf coast with their canoe could take uh our tech leo and uh or invite us over if they're in louisiana or nearby and to do us we could do us my students would probably love to do a 3d scan we could have a field trip in the fall i'm just talking off the top of my head sorry uh i saw a couple questions about this so you know the sort of let's say the ethics of 3d printing in that sense so uh how are they how are the artifacts that have been reproduced uh identified and and how do they connect to the original artifact in the exhibits of the displays and a person that says what what would prevent someone from passing off a 3d object as the real thing and i think i know the answer but i'll let you answer this um you know the effects of 3d printing i think are really um really come come down to you know um appropriating cultural patrimony and you know who do things really belong to um we have things that are not so culturally identifiable because they don't have decoration it's not human remains human brains don't preserve in the mangrove peat any any other kind of bone so we haven't had to deal with that in terms of 3d printing and 3d imaging and posting online so um but that's certainly an issue and um i have an article in an upcoming [Music] book through university press of florida about that includes a discussion of the ethics of of 3d scanning and 3d printing but i think that we're very open about what we scan and we also keep very very accurate uh records we we have we keep our original 3d files we keep our 3d scans at different resolutions and since we haven't actually posted anything online i think uh you know we don't want things used for commercial purposes that would be something i think open sharing uh is is a very good thing but uh certainly um we would like we certainly go to efforts in belize to have the maya people in general who are generally the closest descendants to have access to what we what we find and we'd like to do another exhibit okay um heather i think you've frozen briefly but hopefully heather will come back in a second um are you back let's see yeah yeah i saw you froze it says oh yeah i'm not sure there's my connection or your connection um okay so another question now it's more or less my connection i think okay so just going back to that question what would prevent someone from passing off a 3d artifact as the real thing all right for the folks watching i think we're having a little bit of trouble with the connect uh let's see if heather can get back um [Music] but there she is all right i think you're back heather can you hear me not quite there yet okay i mean we had almost an hour of a good connection from belize so uh hopefully we'll get heather back for a couple more questions i'm trying to see hey there yeah that's true so meanwhile keep looking at some of the questions if she does come back we'll get a chance to ask her a couple more things but let's see [Music] um okay well while we're waiting for heather let's see so this by the way is the last of our current series of archaeology abridged this is our last one for the season we're going to take a break over the summer there won't be any archaeology abridged uh there's nothing scheduled for the summer and then we'll start our next season of archaeology abridged uh in the fall uh and those archaeology abridged talks we're actually going to connect it a little bit more closely to our national lecture program so in that way you will get to hear a short concise archaeological bridge talk from one of our lecturers and then you'll be able to follow that up uh or i think that maybe before you will be able to get a sort of a fuller longer version of of the talk as well uh and so that will start most likely in september but as always we will announce early and often so that you'll be fully aware of what lectures are coming up and we're hoping that we'll have our whole archaeology a bridge schedule up and ready by the end of the summer so that you can just sort of plan uh for those thursday afternoons when there will be talks and if you're interested in any of those lecturers we'll also put in the information for the full length uh like the hour of the 40 minute long lectures that these folks will be giving as well and as always we will have time for q a after uh all these lectures so you'll get a chance uh to chat as well um heather i see that you're back yes i'm finally back i really i'm really sorry it was working so well yeah no don't worry i mean we got we got plenty of uh time so that's i mean i'm surprised that you know but nothing happened earlier uh one one um if you're willing to take another question heather there's some sure this this um one of the questions that's come up now is uh or people have been asking is kind of a a general budget if you're sort of starting up your own diva lab uh what are we talking off in terms of overall cost uh and a budget and training how did how did that come about so how did you kind of set up this whole thing i know you said you got grants but if i guess people want a few specifics yeah i think uh there's re i think there's a whole lot more options right now um we started with three next engine desktop scanners and uh some other software and a big expensive 3d printer because of the grant it was an equipment grant but i think a lot of people have gone straight to photogrammetry which uh only requires a license you can i in my class now i use um i get my students to use their iphones or their regular phones to take the photographs you take 70 to 200 photographs of an artifact and then put it in edusoft photoscan but there's now a variety of other photogrammetry softwares that are actually open source and so the costs have really come down and so photogrammetry is a really good option for starting up and in terms of inexpensive 3d scanners that would be useful for teaching as well as research i there are a lot of scanners available uh on the market now that are in you know under under a thousand dollars so the next engine we started out with uh with the teaching the the college uh i applied for a grant i wanted to empower undergraduates to learn how to do 3d scans and they uh they bought three they bought 10 next engine scanners and 10 high power desktop i7 computers the computer is really the important part i think for anyone starting either teaching or research you need a power a computer with um [Music] a lot of ram and a lot of storage and that's essential and but you could get scanners for instruction that are really not that expensive and so you can you can search around and find them um for more high quality if you have access to more funds the artex our tech space fighter it's you know over 20 000 so you you're talking about a lot of money and you know i've tried for a long time so when corey and i got it on our nsf grant that's something for a big grant to get it and i know uh large institutions have museums have purchased them and they're really accurate and they're really great in the field for research and for teaching and there's a variety of others that various archaeologists have used in the field that are are more expensive 3d printers now you can you can get them at all costs we got a high-end one and we've worked this it's a workhorse it's been working since 2010. we have printed so many things they're going to stop producing the abs plus class oh i think we lost there's our time limit but the the uh makers of that are really surprised someone asked in the in the q a what's the cost of printing something it depends on the size i mean we printed and the quality that you want to print it but uh they could be it's the material your time we don't include our time but for the material uh the material is quite expensive solid um but if oh no it looks like we lost heather again um all right well we are actually at our hour mark we're at 2pm so um i want to thank all of you for tuning in and for tuning into our last archaeological bridge lecture for the season uh stay tuned to the aia we will send out more information about our next season and like i said uh archaeology abridged will again get going in september uh in the meantime there are probably other events that are going to be coming up uh at the aia and we will keep you informed always feel free to check our website all the events will be mentioned there as well and again just a final uh plug for the aia all our programs are supported supported by members and donors so uh archaeological.org donate if you're interested in supporting our work uh if you're interested in becoming a member archaeological.org slash join all right thank you all for attending uh thank you all for making art allowing us to have a very successful arcadia bridge season and we will see you all at the next arcade bridge lecture in the fall amber and emily thank you for being our asl interpreters all right bye everybody

2022-05-23 08:49

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