Education

Part of the Cuneiform Forensics Project is devoted to education. Authentic cuneiform tablets are priceless objects that must be kept safe in museums or research laboratories where scholars and others can use the originals for their studies. But with new 3D technologies, we are now able to produce perfect, highly durable copies in plastic-like materials which can be used in the classroom. For that we are collaborating with the Anthropology Department of Lehman College, CUNY, which has a Rapid Prototyping laboratory. The RP machine at Lehman, which is something like a 3D printer, uses our laser scans to build replicas of tablets by a process that layers thousands of microscopically thin sheets of a photopolymer one on top of another. Imagine building a model of the Empire State Building from layers of scotch tape, each one accurately cut to match a one-inch thick outline cross section of every floor of the building, then hardening it. But in our case, we can be even more precise. The RP uses a robotic method, for it "knows" where to spray out a layer of polymer onto a starting blank, following the 3D coordinates captured by the laser when it scanned the tablet. The overall shape is thus faithfully re-created, automatically. Each tablet replica takes several hours to build and several more to harden. We can also instruct the machine to "scale" the replicas to different sizes, making them smaller or larger depending on our needs.