Access to humanity’s past is crucial to understand the present in the larger historical context. With modern 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies, this access, previously only made available in museums or through research institutions, is becoming increasingly democratized. And the MicroPasts project, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, is doing its part to allow people to digitally explore the artifacts of the British Museum.
In a joint effort between UCL Institute of Archaeology and the British Museum, MicroPasts is using 3D photogrammetry and crowdsourcing to create a library of 3D models of historic artifacts. With a number of decent photographs capturing historical objects from all around a given object, the MicroPasts community can create 3D models for the site’s digital library. Open source software like VisualSfM rely on a process called structure from motion can weave together the collection of 2D photos into a 3D model. In addition to actually 3D modeling the objects themselves, volunteers can also participate in the process of “masking” images for these models, a necessary step in SfM modeling that requires the object being digitized to be traced with a polygon lasso. This helps the software distinguish between the artifact and its background.
Those interested in helping out the project can also tag historical photos of people and objects, tabulate statistics, transcribe and assign geolocations to the objects from the museum’s exhibition. In an interview with Sketchfab, MicroPast’s Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert explains:
Focusing mainly (but not only) on British bronze age metal finds (c 2500–800BC), one of our major types of tasks combines transcription and geolocation. The British Museum has around 30,000 compiled and illustrated index cards which record metalwork discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries. The cards include information such as the objects’ type (spearhead, axe, sword etc), findspot, measurements, condition and sometimes details of the discovery context, with – often beautiful – drawings. MicroPasts users are asked to transcribe this information and, where possible, georeference discovery locations by dragging and dropping a marker on an OpenLayers dynamic map. When combined with the Portable Antiquities Scheme database, this digitised catalogue will become one of the world’s most comprehensive georeferenced datasets of archaeological metal finds.
This work has allowed MicroPasts to curate an already extensive catalog. Keinan-Schoonbaert adds, “Thanks to the joint effort of our core team members and volunteers, we now have 53 models of bronze age palstaves and other axes, spearheads, halberds, loop bracelets and gold nested bracelets from the UK, Palaeolithic handaxes from Tanzania and an Egyptian figurine.” With that in mind, our free 3D printable model of the week is this Bronze Age Spearhead, made possible by MicroPasts and their great community:
By providing these 3D models online for the public to examine and for institutions to share, the humanity can better reflect on its roots, contextualizing itself in the bigger picture. And, tracing history back as far as the Big Bang, we find that humanity is but a blip in the Universe’s timeline, making us infinitesimally small, but, also, that we are made up of the same matter that flows throughout all things, making us inextricably linked to the workings of the entire cosmos.
