Arch Street Project: Sustainable Collaboration and Learning after Reburial Using Digitized Remains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Arch Street Project: Multidisciplinary Research of a Philadelphia Cemetery" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The highly collaborative nature of the Arch Street Project allowed for hands-on learning opportunities for university students. This was an especially valuable experience at universities that traditionally rely on replica human remains for teaching as it increased student access to taphonomic conditions, human variation, and discussions on ethics and reburial. The Arch Street Project also created an opportunity to reconsider the ways human remains can continue to be made accessible for teaching and learning after reburial. This presentation will share the methodology used to digitize the remains of several individuals from the Arch Street Project collection using a combination of 3D infrared light scanning and photogrammetry. The result is an immersive virtual laboratory in which students can practice osteological analysis. Pedagogically, this tool can be used for teaching and assessment and can be adjusted to different experience levels. This also creates an opportunity for collaborative learning across universities with different access to human remains in their teaching collections. It is incredibly important to consider and teach the ethical ramifications of digitizing human remains and to think carefully about ownership of data. For this reason, these scans have not been made publicly available and this presentation will also cover ethical recommendations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Arch Street Project: Multidisciplinary Research of a Philadelphia Cemetery   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38622.0