Recently our anthropology lab purchased a 3D printer and a 3D scanner. This acquisition was motivated by the increasing use of these technologies in archaeology, museums, classrooms, libraries, and every other place where learning is seen as something that
Recently our anthropology lab purchased a 3D printer and a 3D scanner. This acquisition was motivated by the increasing use of these technologies in archaeology, museums, classrooms, libraries, and every other place where learning is seen as something that is a) super fun and b) hands on. As a small department with a limited budget, 3D printing also seemed like an affordable way to supplement our existing teaching collections. One of my roles as lab instructor is to make sure we have sufficient resources for our students to engage with in the lab; this can mean having enough copies for each student or small group of students to examine (e.g., twenty human skeletons) and/or to have enough different versions of something to represent variation (e.g., a left humerus for a human, a chimpanzee, a bushbaby, a baboon, etc.). As lab instructor I’ve also been brainstorming (but have yet to implement) ways to include these tools in lab activities and assignments. For example, if I produce a high quality 3D scan for one of our os coxae to create an open access 3D model of it, all of our students can access it on their personal electronic devices; in Anthropology 209 (Introduction to Biological Anthropology) this model would likely just be used for learning the bones of the body, while in Anthropology 390 (Human Osteology) it could be used for learning methods of sex and/or age estimation and for assessing the use of 3D models versus real or physical copies with these techniques.
So while I have many ideas but not enough time play with these new toys as much as I would like, nor integrate them into classroom learning beyond show-and-tell, I have been able to do some printing.
One of the first successful prints I had was the femur of Homo naledi (pictured above with the rafts and supports still in place). It seemed like the only fitting selection as the open access publication of the 3D files of H. naledi was what motivated us to look into getting 3D printing equipment in the first place. I’ve also printed off a talus, vertebrae, metatarsals, and an articulated hand (pictured below) for this species. We’ve been using them in our Anthropology 209 (Introduction to Biological Anthropology) labs where we set up stations focused on comparative primate and hominin anatomy. Students examine specimens (say a bunch of femora) and then make interpretations and inferences as to why the variations are present (e.g., locomotion, dietary adaptation, reliance on vision versus olfaction, etc.). We introduced the printed H. naledi specimens to our station regarding locomotion this term. Our students compared these prints with casts of limbs representing quadrupeds, knuckle walkers, brachiators, and bipeds, and asked to interpret the pattern of locomotion used by the unknown hominin. Students were not only excited by having these recent finds to examine (once we revealed which hominin they represented), they loved that the specimens were printed in our own lab; as such this has proven an excellent means to discuss not just the printed specimens but classroom technologies and pedagogy with them.
We’ve also used our printer and scanner for outreach. I try to post the print process (and fails) on my social media feeds; I rely heavily on the open access models my peers around the world share on their sites, which brings specimens from around the world into our lab. For our annual Open House I worked with our Social Media guru to do a time lapse capture of a scaled-down model of a human skill (seen below in its cleaned and finished form), which was used in a video during our annual Open House. We held lab tours throughout the day allowing visitors to see and handle the skull after watching it print in the video; many were both surprised to learn that what they saw happen in 30 seconds took closer to three hours, and that we are striving to integrate these kinds of tools and technologies into our lab courses.
While we do also have a scanner, I haven’t been as successful using it to create models for our existing materials. I had the opportunity to scan a Folsom point recovered from a site in Alberta but failed in my attempt; at least it represents a promise of this technology – to connect with archaeologists around our province to scan and print materials (including distributing the models for wider use). While I could blame the material and the quality of our scanner for my fail on this attempt, it is honestly because I still have a lot to learn in terms of using not just the scanner and printer but the excellent free software that’s out there for editing files. I do think my students appreciate my transparency in discussing these print and scan fails, an example of a print fail is pictured below, as they see that I am, and will always be, a learner in the lab. I guess this means I’m using the scanner and printer to model behaviour in addition to objects.
Overall I’m very satisfied with the printer and scanner. I do not think this was a “trendy technology” purchase; I