Giving 3D Scanning a Porpoise: Digitizing the Zooarchaeological Type Collection at the University of West Florida

Summary

The faunal type collection at the University of West Florida’s Department of Anthropology, used for zooarchaeological reference, is composed primarily of specimens of local fauna donated by students, staff, and faculty. These crowdsourced contributions are stored in a lab facility and therefore are not readily available to archaeologists needing to make IDs in the field or to researchers working from afar. Using the department’s NextEngine Desktop 3D scanner and hand-held Sense 3D scanner, we have created digital models of common fauna found on archaeological sites in the greater Pensacola area, including dolphin/porpoise (Delphinidae sp.), turtles (Cheloniidae and Pseudemys sp.), great blue heron (Ardea herodias), alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), and shell (Rangia cuneata and Crassostrea virginica). This presentation will discuss how digitally preserving animal bone can solve problems such as access to collections, space management issues, lack of funding, and biological hazards. The models will be made publicly available for download and printing.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage