Creating and Curating a 3D Dataset: Establishing Categories for Ancient Maya Musical Instruments Using 3D Scans

Summary

The Maya Music Project is dedicated to documenting ancient Maya musical instruments throughout the Maya area. Over the past year and a half the project has been documenting instruments housed in both archaeological laboratories and museums in Guatemala, Belize, and the United States in order to better understand the types of musical instruments that were played by the ancient Maya. At the time of writing this abstract, the project has worked with over 250 musical instruments, and has made 3D models of 98 of those instruments. In the fall of 2016, the project will be making 3D models of the instruments housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the instruments housed in the Peabody Museum’s collection at Harvard University. By performing typological analyses on these artifacts, interesting trends of stylistic attributes begin to emerge that were present throughout the Maya area. The project also played, recorded, and 3D printed playable replicas of many instruments, and has proven that the Maya had a sophisticated understanding of pitch. This talk will discuss trends of stylistic attributes, the sounds that the instruments can produce, and the role that 3D technology can play in this type of analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Music Archaeology

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16851