Bring Out Your Dead: Pondering Passenger Pigeons (and Projectile Points) While Building Digital Type Collections at the Virtual Curation Laboratory

Summary

With support from the Department of Defense's Legacy Program, I am working with undergraduate students in the Virtual Curation Laboratory to create digital type collections of chipped stone tools and zooarchaeological elements. These efforts include scanning stone tools from classic projectile point guides at the New York State Museum (Ritchie's "Typology and Nomenclature of New York Projectile Points") and the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at UNC-Chapel Hill (Coe's "Formative Cultures of the North Carolina Piedmont"). The zooarchaeological type collection includes a wide range of animals, with special attention paid to the passenger pigeon--a species that "celebrated" the 100th anniversary of its extinction in September 2014. Most of our zooarchaeological efforts have drawn on the extensive collections of the Virginia Museum of Natural History, with a few elements provided by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. These 3D digital type collections enable more accurate and faster identification of archaeological items. 3D replicas printed from the digital models are well suited to creating physical type collections, for incorporation into K-12 and undergraduate education, and for integration into public outreach efforts. The generation of 3D models and printed replicas also encourages co-creation projects by undergraduates working in the Virtual Curation Laboratory.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Crowdsourcing, Co-Creation, and Collaboration through Virtual Curation   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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