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A 3,000 Year Old Egyptian Mummy “Speaks” After His Vocal Chords Are 3D Printed #archeology #3Dprinting

It’s not much, “a bit like a long, exasperated meh without the m,” but how amazing is it that scientists managed to 3D scan and print the vocal chords of a 3,000 year old mummified Egyptian priest and used them to produce a sound?

Howard is also hoping to conduct a second stage of research on Nesyamun’s vocal tract that could result in reproducing the sound of him singing as he would have done in his role as a scribe and priest during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses XI. His voice was an essential part of his ritual duties, which involved speaking, chanting and singing.

According to Howard, the team’s Egyptian scholars said the phonetics and the music of the songs were known, so “in principle we could make him make different sounds and we could start to reproduce bits of what he actually sang.” To do that, Howard said he would use computer software to build up the tongue based on the average for a vocal tract of that size.

Read the rest on the CNN website.

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3D Printing in Archeology: Preserving our Heritage

Throughout centuries, humans have established societies, civilizations and empires. These civilizations have long perished but they are still remembered and studied in present times with the help of the structures they built. But these structures cannot be preserved forever. Due to the natural course of time and other many man-made and natural disasters, we have seen the destruction of our heritage which has long been our window to the past.

This problem of how to preserve our heritage has always puzzled experts, but it seems we have finally found a solution to this inevitable problem. Experts are now using 3D printing technology to preserve age-old structures and thus securing the collection, storage and passing-on of knowledge to the next generation.

How 3D Printing Can Be Used by Archaeologists & Museums

By utilizing techniques like 3D scanning and photogrammetry, archaeologists and museums can utilize 3D printing technology to its advantage in many unique ways.

Replicating a Historical Artifact

3D Scanning can be used to create life-size 3D models of existing artifacts that can be 3D printed. These replicas of historical items can be added to museums’ collections, giving the public full access to relics that would otherwise be impossible to display.

Such models can be easily made available to students who can get more insights into the item by getting hands on with objects without fear of damaging the original piece. These interactions can help increase students’ curiosity and can serve as a unique learning experience.

Repairing Damaged Art

If any existing piece of ancient art is damaged or broken, a 3D printer can easily be used to repair the damaged artifact. Even if a work of art is missing a tiny piece, that bit can be seamlessly recreated and replaced. By utilizing 3D scanning, designing and printing, art that was previously destroyed can be restored to its original form.

Preserving Entire Archaeological Sites

3D Printing is not just limited to printing smaller objects; it can be used to recreate an entire archaeological site. By scanning entire structures one by one, these sites can be recreated as a digital CAD model. From there, the CAD model can then be turned into a physical print.

This can give researchers the opportunity to see these sites up close, even iff the original sites are located on the other side of the world.

Real-World Examples

Now that we understand the intersection between 3D printing and archeology (and even the process to 3D print an archaeological relic), let’s take a look at some real-world applications of this process.

Lion of Mosul

Source: Google Arts and Culture

One of the most recent and popular examples of 3D printing and archeology coming together is in the case of Lion of Mosul.

The Lion of Mosul was a 3000-year old colossal Assyrian guardian lion who stood at the entrance of the Temple of Ishtar in Nimrud, Iraq. It was destroyed during the razing of Baghdad’s Mosul Museum by ISIS.

The project was initiated by two Ph.D. students who saw ISIS’s destruction and set out to digitally preserve cultural artifacts. These students launched ‘Rekrei’ and decided to recreate the ancient artifact.

Using crowdsourced images of the work, they utilized photogrammetry to render the 3D model of the statue. This 3D model was then printed to reproduce a life-size replica of the Lion of Mosul. This 3D printed model can now be seen at the Imperial War Museum in London. Visitors can even play around with the 3D model and zoom in to study intricate details.

Recreating Mummies

Mummies have always fascinated scientists and researchers but unfortunately, many mummies have been damaged over time. That damage has led to more restricted access to these ancient mummies, but now with the help of 3D printing, Egyptologists can easily recreate these mummies and study them as much as they want. A simple 3D scanning procedure creates a digital CAD model that can be used to 3D print the mummies.

Scientists at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro have successfully used this technology to recreate mummies. Notably, they’ve even been able to recreate a mummified cat, which was once used as an offering to a God.

A similar use case was also recorded at Harvard’s Semitic Museum in 2012 where they recreated a missing piece from a ceramic lion using a 3D printer. It was able to scan a complete lion that was on loan from another museum to fill in the missing piece on its own.

3D Printing has helped researchers carry out their research without actually handling and disturbing the ancient artifacts, thereby preserving the heritage of our ancestors. As the technology improves, so will our ability to preserve history even more efficiently.

The post 3D Printing in Archeology: Preserving our Heritage appeared first on Shapeways Magazine.

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Google, Stratasys and CyArk Use 3D Scanning and 3D Printing to Preserve Cultural Heritage

Google Arts and Culture is collaborating with Stratasys and non-profit CyArk to preserve 3D scans and 3D prints of some of the world’s most cherished heritage sites. Google’s Open Heritage Project lets you virtually explore sites from all over the world through a fun and immersive experience. Myanmar’s Bagan, the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin, Chichén Itzá you can be an armchair explorer in each of them. Test it out by flying through some of the sites here. 

Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon Temple Thailand.

What’s more, the files are available for download so that teachers in classrooms or museums worldwide can show them off. Kinesthetic learners, the curious and the idle can use them to play with and touch some of the world’s most notable sites. The parts have been crafted for the J750 3D printer which can do multi-color and multi-materials.

The company says that,

“Google Arts and Culture is the restoration of rare plaster casts initially discovered by A.P. Maudslay during the late 1800s in Guatemala. For more than 100 years, these relics were housed across storage facilities in the British Museum. By leveraging 3D laser scanners to virtually re-assemble each, designers successfully reconstructed these items in physical form with Stratasys 3D printing – later allowing representations to be easily viewed by a wider audience online.”

An impression of Stela E of  the Mayan Quirigua site in Guatemala taken by Alfred Maudslay

Alfred Maudslay went to Quirigua in 1881 and was enthralled by the Mayan civilization and the remote Quirigua site. In total, he would undertake six Mayan expeditions. Above in the image, we can see an impression of Stela E of the Quirigua site. Over ten meters tall it was erected on the 22nd of January in 771 AD. From then on it let all passers-by know that the ruler K’ak’ Tiliw Chan Yopaat ruled here.

“From the beginning, Maudslay understood that a three-dimensional record would be needed if the surviving Maya remains were to be fully analysed by future generations of archaeologists and epigraphers. To this end, he set about producing a complete set of moulds of the monoliths. Once shipped back to London, the moulds and resulting plaster casts were used to produce exact drawings of the glyphs, which were published with the photographs in his Archaeology (1889–1902), later bound to form a comprehensive record of the Maya ruins of Central America. The result was a magnificent work of documentation which, in the words of Maudslay’s biographer, is ‘valued as highly by modern scholars as it was by their predecessors a century ago’.

In the 1880s archeology, especially of a remote foreign site was far more Grand Theft Auto than it is today. At the time Mayan culture was little understood in the West and Mandalay’s exploration of the site, excavation and impressions were instrumental in our understanding Mayan language and culture. Mayan stelae can be found throughout Mayan lands sometimes standing ten meters or more these objects are thought to tell histories and reinforce Mayan rule. Celebrating kings and commemorating events these stelae gave real insight into the politics of Mayan life. The important Quirigua site also held squat zoomorphs or animal inspired shapes that show gods in the Mayan world. By taking their impressions and cataloging them in his tome; an impression of the site was transported around the world to be studied. Stratasys, Google, and CyArk are now doing a very similar much more high tech thing with 3D scanning and 3D printing. In Maudlays footprints they are finding a way to let us all study impressions of an unfathomable past.

Alfred Maudslay at Chichên Itzá.

Bryan Allen, a Design Technologist at Google, said: 

“The project was to explore physically making these artifacts in an effort to get people hooked and excited about seeing pieces in a museum or research context. That’s when we turned to 3D Printing.” “With the new wave of 3D Printed materials now available, we’re able to deliver better colors, higher finish, and more robust mechanical properties; getting much closer to realistic prototypes and final products right off the machines. When we talk to arts and culture preservationists, historians, and museum curators, they’re all absolutely amazed by the ability to fabricate these things with such high fidelity via 3D printing technology,”

Rafie Grinvald, Enterprise Product Director of Rapid Prototyping, Stratasys, said:

“Combining rich colors and translucency in a single print, designers and engineers can build models with heightened levels of accuracy and realism – mirroring opaque or transparent structures, and even complex materials like rubber.”

CyArk has already done some amazing work worldwide in 3D scanning many of the world’s most well-known objects. Will more 3D scans mean that one could at one point download a museum? In the past, we’ve written about 3D Printing being used to let the visually impaired feel exhibits, and how exhibits could be touched by everyone, seen how Berlin’s museums have used 3D printing and 3D scanning and seen how you can restore things through 3D scanning and printing,  We’ve also delved much deeper, looking into the ethics of 3D scanning exhibits. Could we open up a 100 3D printed British Museums worldwide? Could every classroom have access to many of the world’s most important objects? What do you think?