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3D Printing Ancient Structures for Reconstruction - Ep 97
200 Plays6 years ago
Through the power of the internet we interview Alexei Vranich from his field site in Cambodia about work he did in Bolivia! This podcast is based on a paper (linked below) about reconstructing an ancient structure at Tiwanaku in Bolivia. This structure was incomplete and they had no idea what it was supposed to look like. But, through some high tech methods and good old fashioned elbow grease they figured it out.
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
3D Printing at Tiwanaku: Ancient Architecture Reimagined
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 97. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk about 3D printing a site in Bolivia to better understand it. Let's get to it.
00:00:22
Speaker
Well, I just got back a couple hours ago from a school field trip. We went down to the University of Pennsylvania Museum and I didn't get the chance to meet with Kyle Olson, who we had on interviewed last week.
00:00:34
Speaker
But as I've said before, I got my MA and my PhD at Penn in the anto department. Kyle Olson is at Penn in the anto department.
Meet Alexei Vranic: From Angkor Wat to Tiwanaku
00:00:42
Speaker
And now this week, since we're doing a Penn themed month apparently in January, we have somebody else, an old friend of mine, Alexi Vranic, who was also at Penn alongside me and actually lived in the same house as me for a year or two when we were grad students there.
00:00:58
Speaker
Alexei is calling in today from Cambodia. He's working at Angkor Wat, but we brought him in because not for the work that he's doing there, but for work that he's done at Tiwanaku last month.
00:01:10
Speaker
There was a publication in the Inherited Science, an online journal called Reconstructing Ancient Architecture at Tiwanaku, Bolivia, the Potential and Promise of 3D Printing. And it was a very interesting article and really right up our alley here on Architex. So without further ado, Alexei, how are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm calling in, as you said, from Cambodia. We just started work over at Angkor, and it's a beautiful, cool morning here. Wonderful.
00:01:40
Speaker
Now, most of your work, I remember you giving a presentation way back in the day on Angkor Wat, but I understand most of your work is in Tiwanaku, or do you split your time between the two places? Actually, I split my time between the two countries of Peru and Bolivia, but it's the same area. It's the Highland Andes, and one of my projects is at the site of Tiwanaku. That's about 500 to 1,000 AD.
00:02:06
Speaker
And that's on the Bolivian side. And the other part is in Cusco, as in Cusco of Machu Picchu fame with the Inca Empire. And I've been working there for the last few years also. Both of them deal with monumental architecture and what we call pre-Columbian urbanism.
00:02:23
Speaker
Right. And so monumental architecture is basically the theme of the article that you wrote, the one that we published last month, December, well, for our audience, December of 2018. We've got the link in the show notes. And can you give us a brief explanation of what the building was and what you were trying to do that's different about it, what your approach was?
Unfinished Puma Punku: Challenges and Innovations
00:02:49
Speaker
Well, the working I was doing at Tiwanako was all over the site, but my dissertation and my first love of the place was this place called the Puma Pumko, or Gateway of the Puma, or Jaguar. And this was considered one of the most amazing buildings at the site, if not the entire Andes.
00:03:08
Speaker
And people that had gone by through that area, starting as early as 1539, looked at it and said, what did this look like? Because these blocks were huge, they were incredibly accurately cut.
00:03:22
Speaker
And they're also scattered about. It was really clear even at that moment that the building had never been finished. And since that moment, people have been trying to reconstruct what this looked like. We really hadn't progressed too much, including myself. I'd spent about 15 years working at the site and looking at these blocks and not making much progress, trying all these different types of technological approaches from laser scanning,
00:03:50
Speaker
to other types of photogrammetry. And then 3D printing started. And that gave me another idea to take the blocks that we had already measured out by hand through our project and other archaeologists, and then simply type them in by hand into the computer, create models, and then print them out. Great. So now in the article, you say that the site, or the Puma Punku, rather, has been really badly
00:04:19
Speaker
mind, I guess, essentially for its blocks greatly disturbed over time and blocks are in different positions, a lot of them are broken. In the article, you talk about doing some things like photogrammetry, but in the end, as I understand it, that's not what you were using for the 3D printing, you were using other measurements, is that correct?
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, that is correct. We did some photogrammetry, and that requires it's an amount of time to be able to take all the pictures and then bring you into the computer and fix it up. What we ended up doing mostly is first understanding what exactly are our needs. Photogrammetry is going to record the surface of the stone in incredible detail, but we really didn't need that. What we needed was to have the geometric form of the block
00:05:13
Speaker
in its intended form. So surface erosion, recent breaks, areas that are missing weren't actually important to this type of project. So we reduced the amount of data down to from photogrammetry would have thousands if not more of measurements in digital form down to a dozen or so measurements down to maybe eight for a single block. And with that form, which was accurately measured, we had enough to start
00:05:43
Speaker
piecing them together. How big are these blocks in real life? Well, some of them are small. You can put it in your hand. That would be a small example to some of the largest ones made of andesite, which is maybe three or four meters across, about maybe 12 tons, if not more. And then they had the foundations that were set on, which are sandstone blocks. And I think the biggest block there is 130 tons.
00:06:12
Speaker
Were those carved right there? Do you know where the quarry was for
Construction Materials and Techniques at Tiwanaku
00:06:19
Speaker
some of those? Well, for the sandstone blocks, they were about maybe 10 kilometers away. So that was a substantial amount of dragging to get it there. But for the Andesite, it was on the other side of the lake.
00:06:33
Speaker
So they had to get it across. And several years ago, for one TV show, we actually made one of the reed boats that you could see on the lake, mostly for tourists now, that would have been bundled up like reeds from Egypt, or what Tor Heyerdahl did. And we made ourselves a large 12 ton boat and were able to bring across one of these stones, a 10 ton stone from one side to another. Really?
00:06:59
Speaker
On a reed boat. On a reed boat, yes. So that was no problem. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, geez.
00:07:06
Speaker
Maybe they just flooded the whole area and brought the sandstone in that way, too. Well, we really don't know, except we got a lot of drag marks. And then we have things around the area called tired stones, piedras cansadas. And that relates a little bit to the animism of the culture, the idea that stones themselves are alive. And at a certain point, the stone just became tired and couldn't make it to the site. So we do have the route, more or less, that it would have taken from quarry to the site.
00:07:35
Speaker
the blocks that you still have at the site that you were measured. How many of them were you dealing with total? We ended up making about 150 blocks. And what's the overall dimensions of this building, of this structure rather, the Puma Punku? What is it? The Puma Punku, the complex itself is quite large. We're just addressing in this research a smaller area, which was the central ritual focus. So we're looking at, you know, good Lord, what is it?
00:08:03
Speaker
30 meters by 6 meters, an area of this would have been an amazing building, incredibly built up. And all with this ashlar masonry, all no other materials to it? As far as we know, we get 2 meters of rain and all types of wind up there and all types of adverse conditions. So the only thing that does preserve will be the stone.
00:08:28
Speaker
The question about the actual reconstruction of this thing, which is the focus of this article and the reason you were 3D printing this was so you could try to figure out what the heck was this thing? How did these blocks fit back together? Because they didn't leave the blueprints laying around. So along those lines, some of the, I guess, evidence that you used to help reconstruct the blocks themselves was historical evidence that people had made drawings and even photographs from 100 plus years ago.
00:08:57
Speaker
showing early visits to the site. Did you have any other ethnographic evidence or any other evidence in the area of similar blocks being used for construction where you could maybe say, hey, maybe it was one of these buildings or something similar? Well, initially, we didn't have any of this. We have descriptions from the initial moment of the Spanish conquest, and those are short descriptions saying things like, this is amazing, this is huge, there's some doorway standing up.
00:09:24
Speaker
And they convey a sense of amazement and awe more than actual anything that we can go by when it comes to reconstructing. We start getting our first maps and drawings in the middle of the 19th century, but by that point, all these blocks have been moved around the areas under some of the platforms or the slabs where the building would have been set has been
00:09:48
Speaker
undermined looking for treasure and even in one case just completely shattered open. So, we had very little evidence. Actually, I'd say no evidence at all of what standing architecture at Tiwanako looked like.
Reconstructing History: Missing Pieces and New Insights
00:10:00
Speaker
So, we started off pretty bad. We had a building that was never finished and the blocks are missing and we don't know what it looked like. So, we were trying to...
00:10:12
Speaker
the intent of something that never existed and we don't even have anything to compare it to. So, it was a tough start and that's why for the last 500 years or so people have been saying, what did this look like? And the reconstructions have been strange and of course ancient alien folks, the Puma Punco is the
00:10:34
Speaker
is the golden child of the ancient alien folks. So if you type that in online, 10,000 sites appear related to aliens and technology. So we started off with very little information. We did have other people go to the sites and make in the last century a few connections between the blocks.
00:10:56
Speaker
So we did have some background information. And that was the case of several large blocks that had been shattered, and those were pieced together. So we knew that there were some large gateways. And then a researcher over at UC Berkeley, a colleague of mine, John Pierre Protson, was able to make a few connections based on the fact that these blocks were
00:11:18
Speaker
You know very well formed there would've been no mortar just would've been stone on stone precise connections probably the most precise in the continent so you're able to put a few together. So we had a little bit of clues and then he had a breakthrough because one of the more elaborate stones that look like a little miniature.
00:11:39
Speaker
something. I mean, this is a large, large block that cannot be moved by a person. He realized that that was a representation of a wall of a temple. So we had a model.
00:11:51
Speaker
And this model was actually quite accurate. It was a 0.57% reduction of a larger temple. And taking that wall of this one model apart, he was able to reconstruct what a wall would have looked like.
00:12:09
Speaker
For a building but he wasn't able to put that wall on the foundations or understand its context so that's how we started off. Yeah that model was really interesting to me when i read the article because you know it's not small like you said and in its own right would have taken.
00:12:26
Speaker
I don't know. This is the question. How long do we know, ethnographically or just from stoneworking in general around the world, how long it would have taken to make something like that model in particular? Because I'm curious as to
00:12:40
Speaker
basically the timeframe of construction for the entire site and estimation on timeframe and, you know, trying to piece back, you know, really what was going on back there. So do you, do you have an estimate on time for stone working and things like that? Like, let's just take that model for, as an example. Wow. Absolutely not. Um, listen, that, that stone, you know, to drag from one side of the lake to the other takes its time. Uh, then you have to bring it up and then the technology or the methods they were using for it is not completely known.
00:13:10
Speaker
how much they want to spend on it. And we're dealing with a ritual building. So neither time nor energy is of consideration when you're building for the gods and you're building for eternity. So it's a whole different scale when it comes to making something like this. So no, I have no estimates at all. Now, but to answer questions, we did have excavations around the area and we're able to find some carbon dates.
00:13:37
Speaker
related to the construction of the complex around it and some changes in masonry. And the interesting thing about it is that the Puma Punco is seen as the example, the Apogee, the greatest
00:13:52
Speaker
achievement of the Tiwanako culture, if not all of Andean architecture, and is thought to be the last building on site. And since it was left unfinished, people have come up with ideas that, you know, suddenly invaders came in and people dropped their tools and ran, or there was a sudden collapse because of plague or environment. But the dates we had on it were very early.
00:14:14
Speaker
about maybe 400 years before the collapse of Polity, even 200 years before it became large in its moment of greatest influence. So the best building, the most elaborate building, is one of the earlier buildings on site. And then later on, we get stonework, which looks good, but it's not as good as a Puma Punko. So we have this
00:14:39
Speaker
maybe one or two generations where at the site they're building in this incredibly precise way and then they decide to not continue with it and literally abandon it and left it and went off to build other things in a less precise way. That's interesting. Do you have any antecedents of this kind of construction?
00:15:00
Speaker
Now what we were able to do as we continued, I realized that when I'm putting this together, these pieces were printed out. So I have 150 pieces. We milled out the foundation in wood and then put it on the table. And it was in my living room for about a year.
00:15:18
Speaker
and all the paces were there. I was actually living as a faculty in residence in the dormitories with the students. So students would come in, and first of all, they're wondering why is this middle-aged guy living in the freshman dorm? And once they got over that, they, they're like, either this guy is the coolest guy ever or something's wrong. We don't know. And then there's this elaborate demonic Lego set.
00:15:46
Speaker
on the table in the living room. And they go, well, what is this? And I go, well, this are pieces of a temple that we excavated. And it's been reduced 4% its original size. And I'm trying to put it together. And it just stayed there. And I put things together. The cat would jump on it at night, knock it over. And the process would continue again in the morning. And
3D Printing Process: Piecing Together the Puzzle
00:16:11
Speaker
this was the beauty of 3D printing as opposed to
00:16:15
Speaker
putting it all on the computer and trying to rotate it. It was very intuitive. So once it was there, it just simply existed like a puzzle in your house that you work on for a while and eventually you get bored, you get frustrated, you leave, you come back the next day and then all of a sudden you make a connection. Oh wait, that piece goes there. That piece goes there.
00:16:36
Speaker
So it had been set up on the living room table as a way of having it there passively for about a full year. And as I would sit there with my coffee or just hanging out every once in a while, I would make a connection. And then all of a sudden you're like, there's no way I'm going to advance. And then maybe a few days or a week would go by without anything. And then you'd be like, oh wait, that goes there.
00:16:59
Speaker
And that was the case with that model stone. There were several pieces of this tiny version of the temple. When I say tiny, about the size of a person, height-wise. And it had been laid out in front of me, and it had been represented in publications as a facade. And I'd try to create a facade out of it, going, maybe this is the back of the temple, or maybe the front.
00:17:23
Speaker
And then one day, just sitting there with my cat and full coffee, I just grabbed one piece and realized, wait, these meet at right angles.
00:17:31
Speaker
And I just simply flipped them around, and that was just one of these moments when all of a sudden, all the pieces started falling into place. Because now I had one side of a miniature temple, and then I had another side, and then another side, and then all these pieces came in. I could see the relationships, at least in tiny form, of what a Tiwanako building would have looked like. And then that became the basis for adding several more of these pieces together.
00:18:01
Speaker
That's really cool. A little early, but why don't we
Monetization and Materials: The Business Side of 3D Printing
00:18:05
Speaker
take a break? And when we come on the other side of the break, we can bug you, ask some actual technical details about how you went about making these models and who worked on you with the reconstructions and what some of the takeaways it would be that you had of this way of proceeding with reconstructing the architecture.
00:18:25
Speaker
Hey everyone, Chris Webster here, co-founder of the Archaeology Podcast Network, and I just wanted to put out a quick plea for members and underwriters. So if you head on over to arkpodnet.com forward slash members, you can support us with a monthly, basically donation, but you get a lot of extra perks with that, uh, from swag to private Slack team to interact with the hosts and myself and Tristan.
00:18:49
Speaker
the other co-founder and a bunch of other things. And also, we're looking for underwriters. We need people to underwrite this podcast because it costs a lot of money to actually keep it going every month. We're looking at about $3,000 to $4,000 a month. So for $1,000 a month, you can actually underwrite every episode of the podcast network
00:19:06
Speaker
before I said one month and that's a bunch of shows with your message on it and 135,000 plus people hearing it. So head on over to arcpodnet.com forward slash ads for that. And thank you very much to all the people that have supported us in the past and continue to support us. Now back to the show.
00:19:24
Speaker
All right, welcome back to the archaeotech podcast episode 97. And we are talking about 3d printing. So Alexi, I think, uh, I think it's time to get into a little bit of nuts and bolts on this 3d printing because you basically had, well, you had one choice for your 3d printing method, which we've actually talked about in the past, which is, you know, you're, you're fairly common. In fact, I'm literally 3d printing something as we speak in plastic, the PLA plastic, which you mentioned in the article here.
00:19:52
Speaker
But you guys decided to go another way. So I don't really want to talk about the plastic too much because we have talked about that before. But you use something called the powder method. And I'm wondering, first, can you explain without getting into the technical details how that differs from the plastic? What's your end result for this? The end result is it looks like a piece of marble.
00:20:12
Speaker
That would be the best description of it. It even has a weight and feel of it. But to get to that point, it's plaster of Paris, dust being placed down in micron layers. Takes a few hours, of course. And then once you have that, you have a pretty fragile form that you pull out of this powder bed, then you brush it off, and then you essentially drip crazy glue on it.
00:20:38
Speaker
carefully, it's dangerous, basically work for undergrads. So they do that and they get sticky fingers and perhaps they inhale some things. However, the result is that we have a piece that looks and feels like soapstone or marble. And what's the advantage of that? Yeah. The advantage of it is flat out,
00:21:03
Speaker
feels good. It just feels good. And you think that's sort of like, you know, are you making something for the pleasure of it? No, you're making it because you need for it to be handled. You need to be felt. And as archaeologists, we spend so much time picking up pieces and we bring in so much information from our fingers.
00:21:24
Speaker
from the weight of something, from its feel, that I wanted to replicate something that also had, in very much reduced form, the feel of stone architecture. In this case, also a feel of what a real artifact would be like. By picking up a piece of plastic, for an archaeologist, you see something on the ground, you pick it up as plastic, you immediately recoil in horror and drop it, because it's not archaeological.
00:21:52
Speaker
So you're looking for something that you want to look at and you want to feel every time you touch it You're essentially dropping information into the subconscious part of your brain. Yeah, that was one of the bigger things I was wondering about when I read the article was I was looking at output in your primary goal and it seemed to me like your primary goal was to basically try to reconstruct the building and have a scale model with which to do that and I was like, okay, the method you used was more expensive but produced a
00:22:21
Speaker
more accurate, more realistic feeling model. But my first question was, okay, but was that necessary? Because you could have done the same thing with plastic, even though there's expansion and contraction of plastic and things like that. It changes a little bit. It doesn't seem like it would change enough that you couldn't actually reconstruct the building. But I guess if you're only going to do it probably once, realistically, you may as well have a really good one. That's kind of what you were thinking.
00:22:44
Speaker
Basically, yes, this is not something that I need to do one week and then we have 10 more to go before the end of the month. This was something that had been my obsession almost for two decades. It had been a question that had been asked 500 years ago and then over and over again.
00:23:01
Speaker
So it was worth it. It was worth to print it out. Now I could have print this out in plastic or in corn based solutions and that would have been $200 and instead we did it this way and that was $1,200. Considering how much time had already been invested in this project, that wasn't a big deal. Okay, it's good to know. Good to know. I had never actually heard of this method before and it sounds really cool for producing something that comes out as a
00:23:31
Speaker
I mean, something you can leave on your coffee table for a year, quite frankly. You know, it looks nice.
00:23:38
Speaker
Well, I liked it. That resonated with me because anytime I handle a conventionally extruded plastic 3D printed object, I do have that where you just said recoil from it. I don't actually like the tactile sense of most 3D printed objects. They feel a little weird to me. So you said that you went with a different thing, with the different materials specifically for the feel made a lot of sense to me in a gut way.
00:24:07
Speaker
And also, you know, tied hand in hand, and you did mention this, is that we as archaeologists are used to handling things and we're used to picking things up and fitting them together. I mean, how much time have we, the three of us here, spent in our lives fitting together pieces of pottery?
00:24:26
Speaker
I know I've spent a lot of time in Italy, just like we were saying in the last section, like one does a puzzle. I wander into the workshop on projects where the ceramicist is trying to piece together pots or trying to come up with the typology and just feel the the the sherds for a little bit. And so that really seems like a way of
00:24:48
Speaker
exploiting a particular niche that we as archaeologists have, a particular set of skills that we may not even been taught explicitly as a set of skills, but just how we're used to dealing with materials.
Confidence in Reconstruction: Testing and Adjustments
00:25:01
Speaker
Alexi, in relation to basically after you had your kind of aha moment and you got the building
00:25:07
Speaker
I guess reconstructed. I mean, there's images of it here in the in the article. Do you think it's right? Like, I mean, it all fits together that way and looks like a building. But what is what is what percentage in your brain is saying, you know, this this might not be right. Well, let me let me let me clarify one thing. I was able to to reconstruct well, the model. And this was a miniature model of a temple that existed within the larger temple.
00:25:32
Speaker
Right. So we have that down. And I'm very confident when it comes to that reconstruction. That being said, one of the things about using this model is that these types of printouts is that you have the ability not to get too attached to a narrative.
00:25:52
Speaker
And this is something that it almost comes up in, I guess my comparison would be every show on Netflix about crime where somebody gets, you know, they have their information, they find a guy and then the police decide just to go after that guy and ignore all the other information. And then some journalist comes up and he goes, oh, but you never considered this and so on. In this case, I could put these pieces out and as opposed to having them
00:26:20
Speaker
on the computer where they're set, or just using that, I could put them on the table, and of course the cat would knock it over eventually, and then it would have to put it back together. And that allowed me to go back and refit these things over and over and over. And more than once, I had a fit.
00:26:38
Speaker
And I was like, I mean, a fit. I had pieces that that actually, you know, joined together and I was happy because that was my progress for the day. And then next morning I'd wake up, find the pieces on the ground and then try to put it back together and realize, you know what, this doesn't fit.
00:26:57
Speaker
And then you have to drop it. So it allows you not to quickly start already creating a narrative of what the building looked like, but it had to be retested several times. In the case of the model, I'm fairly confident. And that became the basis.
00:27:13
Speaker
for putting together the other 145 blocks. And in that case, I have enough information to have the general form of the building and its layout and enough to be able to draw some conclusions and interpretations. But there's a lot of blocks that are laying around that I simply don't know where they went.
00:27:35
Speaker
And given time, you know, we'll may perhaps find another block, another block here, and that'll be fit together. But those are sort of architectural details. I do have enough to say it's like, okay, this is the form of the building. And Paul, to go back to one of your questions, is there any like antecedents to it?
Cultural Insights: Skeuomorphism and Community Engagement
00:27:53
Speaker
Well, that's when we made another discovery because Tiwanaka was supposed to be this primary state, this incredible new form of human society. People pretty much ignored the previous earlier societies that existed in the area just because Tiwanaka was supposed to be a structural difference.
00:28:13
Speaker
from one culture to another. It'd be like trying to reconstruct Nero's palace by using a description of Romulus's hut. It's like, okay, they're in the same area, but they're not really that good when it comes to sort of like as an analog for one for the other. In this case, there was all these previous cultures, but they said, no, Tiwanaka was spectacular. It's like the Inca or like the Aztecs. They had nothing to do with the previous stuff. That's how great they were.
00:28:39
Speaker
And then once we had some of it together, we looked at some adobe buildings and photographs from excavations from UPenn, actually, and we realized, oh, wow, this building is the stone version of an adobe ritual building.
00:28:55
Speaker
that existed 500 years before. So it was essentially a skeomorph, similar to Greek temples being the stone version of the archaic wooden forms and then Roman temples copying it and now we have the capital of the United States and we have post offices that have forms in there that are essentially
00:29:14
Speaker
wooden stone versions of wooden motifs. So we were able to look at that and go, indeed, we have a previous version of the Puma Punco. And the Puma Punco had been immortalized in stone. So once we had the model, once we had some previous forms from photographs from early excavations, we were able to put the building together and go, at least we know where it came from, what its final appearance was.
00:29:42
Speaker
But as for all the other blocks, oh my God, yeah, we have a lot, a lot more blocks to do. So what I ended up doing was teaching the local folks here, and this is a great thing about this method, is that as opposed to laser scans or computers, other things that don't do well at 13,000 feet,
00:30:02
Speaker
I invited the folks from Tiwanaka over. I printed out another version of the model, gave it to them, and showed them this method where they could go off into the field, measure it, model it on the computer using SketchUp, which is a very inexpensive, intuitive program. They could send it to me if they want. I could print it out and send it back to them. So if they ever found another block, and there are lots of them still laying around, they could model it, do that, and then continue with the process down at the site itself.
00:30:30
Speaker
Nice. And the overall model, this one that you had pieced together at 150 some odd blocks, is that still the school there? Well, I have one of them is with me. And the other one I printed out. And because it had to be transported, I actually printed it out in a sort of a plastic base. And that was given to the local authorities. They were delighted with it. And now that one exists at the site museum.
00:30:57
Speaker
And my hope is that, you know, we can put that up as an exhibit in the museum itself so people can see the process of sort of archaeological thought and the way that archaeologists are so good at visualizing 3D space. Just so everybody knows, you've got a file that's available with this article. And correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just I'm just reading this again. It's the actual all the blocks so somebody could print them out themselves. You've got the the STL files that you can just print out on anything.
00:31:27
Speaker
That's correct. Right on that article, there's two files. One of them is the Sketchup file. So you can download that, download Sketchup, you get it free for eight hours, you can play around with it. And if you find something that fits together, you could even put it together virtually, send it to me if you'd like and say, hey, does this fit? And the other one is the STL files, which if you have your own printer, or you have access to one, print them out.
00:31:52
Speaker
and go for it. Look at the rules that JP Protson at UC Berkeley established, look at the fits that I did, reconstruct them, and then if you can find something else, the wisdom of crowds, oh please, let's put this building together. Very cool.
00:32:08
Speaker
So a couple of the rules that you found, you explained in the article about how you would explore trying to find the logic of the buildings, and this is getting towards my love of ancient architecture. So these blocks are all monolithic, they're faced on both sides, right?
00:32:25
Speaker
They're faced on every side. The front to back is absolutely perfect. So that means that in this wouldn't necessarily work in other kinds of sites where you have a bunch of standard blocks, maybe even just faced on one side with some kind of fill. So that's nice that you can do that. But then because these are big monolithic blocks, you were able to sort them in various ways. And can you tell the listeners what you found was a very effective sorting mechanism or method rather?
Piecing Blocks and Complexity at Puma Punku
00:32:54
Speaker
that helped you try to start to see them and see the logic behind them? Well, think of the start of this. I thought, great, let's put this together. And then all of a sudden, I have 150 blocks in front of me in a pile. And I'm like, how in the world am I going to start developing these categories? Let me pull out the ones that we know go together. So then I have 144 blocks left. And what do we do?
00:33:18
Speaker
Now we know that the Tiwanako really liked horizontal coursing. And this was absolutely precise, as in the blocks were set and then perhaps even all ground down at the same time. So it's not a wavy course. It's not alternating or blocks being fit. They would create one course and then another course. So we thought, you know what? Let's go with that method and let's divide up blocks just by their height.
00:33:43
Speaker
This would have taken forever on the computer. You have to measure it out, measure it out here. We just put all the blocks in their standing position and put our hand on it. And you could tell that one's higher than that one, that one's higher than that one. So in about five minutes, we had all these categories based on height. And we knew, at least according to this rule, is that the ones of similar height belonged most likely to the same course
00:34:06
Speaker
on the building. So we couldn't have ones from a taller height or larger with a smaller one. So there we were able to go. It's like maybe these guys fit. So we're able to reduce some categories and some blocks down to who are their likely neighbors.
00:34:25
Speaker
That observation really interested me, especially with regards to how you're putting it together because it seems almost exactly like how we start doing a jigsaw puzzle, right? You lay out all the pieces and you find the corners and the edges and you start building that edge out and you've got a logic then, you've got parameters to fit the rest of it in. So I thought that was a particularly ingenious way of looking at these 3D printed blocks to try to piece together your puzzle.
00:34:53
Speaker
Exactly. We have to have some guidelines and understanding the rules or some aspects of the rules was essential because when I brought this to a conference and I put it down in front and then we had about maybe 80 different Andean archaeologists. So they're all familiar with Tiwanaka, with the area. They're all excited about it. They didn't have
00:35:15
Speaker
those rules or those understanding. And I thought, let's see if they can put any of them together. And zero, it was out there for three days. And we have the world experts in the continent doing that. And it's not because they're, you know, they're not smart, but because they didn't have that understanding of what the corner pieces were, what are the ones that even went together?
00:35:34
Speaker
So you had people trying to put a puzzle together with a red piece and trying to force it together with a black piece, you know, or some other color and under no condition would that ever happen. So while at the start of it, we didn't know exactly what it looked like, we knew that certain combinations couldn't exist. And that brought us closer to what could actually exist. You know, I don't have a familiarity very much with Andean archaeology, let alone architecture.
00:36:02
Speaker
And I'm wondering with the complexity of this building and how it went together, is that normal for other Andean archaeology that is actually together that you can see that it's constructed of so many different pieces and laid out in the way that it is? Or was this building kind of a one-off? Because it's kind of making me think that
00:36:19
Speaker
With the couple generations that would have taken to not only quarry but car drag and carve and then police pieces together that maybe they simply together because the guy with the plans in his head died before they could get to construction and there was like i don't know how this goes together just abandon it i mean is this typical of architecture in that area.
00:36:38
Speaker
No, no, this isn't typical at all. This is such a unique building to the point, as I say, you know, go on YouTube and you can see that one guy from ancient aliens going, it's like, this is the best evidence for alien intervention.
00:36:54
Speaker
It is that unique. So I did get a method that was very applicable to this building. And as Paul, you said, you know, other buildings might not be that good when it comes to using this method because I had down to millimeter accuracy. And one block, it was off by a centimeter. And I said, this block and that block doesn't fit.
00:37:16
Speaker
They just don't fit. This is a very special building. Now we have to go look to see, well, where else can we use it with this level of accuracy? The sandstone here at Angkor would be one example. There's going to be other places around the world. But when it comes to other sites, if this method is usable, and I think it is, it's going to have to be modified.
00:37:37
Speaker
Well, I think that we can leave it with that because this has been an interesting discussion of experimentation in archaeology, trying to bring in a new method to interpret old architecture that people have looked at and scratched their
Modern Techniques: Reconstructing History with Archives
00:37:52
Speaker
heads at. And you seem to have taken a good solid chip at it with this 3D printing as a way of exploring how things fit. It's really cool. Thanks for sharing it with us.
00:38:05
Speaker
Well, thank you there, Paul, and say old architecture. But I'd also like to add, some of these blocks don't exist anymore. But drawings from the 1800s, if they're accurate, could be also modeled and brought into the modern period. So it's another way to bring up archival information and make it compatible. Yeah, that's great.
00:38:25
Speaker
And kind of puts a point on, I'm a cultural resource management archeologist here in this country and always put an emphasis on detailed analysis and explanation and description and photographs and drawings because you never know what it's going to be used for later or how far into the future. Exactly. And some of these folks had some craziest ideas, but really good drawings. So the result is, yeah, we could use them. Very nice. All right. Well, thank you, Alexi. And thanks again, Paul, for hooking up this interview.
00:38:54
Speaker
and we'll be back in a second with App of the Day segment. Thank you. Thanks, Alexei. Hey, everybody. This is Chris Webster, and now I'm talking to you about WildNote. Head on over to WildNoteApp.com to check out what I'm talking about. WildNote is a data collection and management application. If you are a CRM archaeologist, an archaeologist, a biologist, and any ologist,
00:39:14
Speaker
Then you can use WildNote. We have a ton of pre-built forms for your use, including some administrative forms, field checklists, time sheets, phone logs, archaeology standard forms, tons of those, biological forms, wetlands forms, other compliance forms, cultural resource management forms, agency forms, Nevada, California, Utah, Colorado, everything else coming down the line.
00:39:35
Speaker
excellent photograph management. So end-to-end project management with WildNote. Check it out, wildnotemap.com. That's wildnotemap.com for your free 30-day trial. That's right. It's free. Go check it out. All right. Welcome back to the Archaeotech podcast episode 97. And this is our app of the day segment. When I first got into 3D printing,
00:39:58
Speaker
What I was told to go check out, one of the websites was Thingiverse. T-H-I-N-G-I-V-E-R-S-E. They have a website, but they also have a smartphone application. You're sitting there waiting for an Uber at dinner or something. You can explore Thingiverse. There are so many crazy things on Thingiverse that people have thought about.
00:40:19
Speaker
I opened up the app and they've got some featured stuff sitting here and one of them is this little Christmas elf town lamp. It just looks like they printed this little town setting in white and then put a light under it and that's pretty much it and it looks amazing.
00:40:34
Speaker
I know. And I was inspired after reading this article to get back into the 3D printing because I hadn't done anything in a while. And I printed a nice little business card holder for myself that I found on Thingiverse. And the nice thing about Thingiverse files is you get them as OBJ files or object files or STL files. And depending on what software you're using to modify or print with these, you can usually just send them straight to your printer. Whatever printer software you have, I'm using an Ultimaker.
00:41:00
Speaker
two plus or whatever it is. And that printer uses the Ultimaker Cura software, C-U-R-A. And you just bring it in there and then that creates what's called a G-code file, which is basically just a complicated series of X, Y, Z coordinates to actually make your print. And the Cura app uses the STL file. So all that means is you download straight from Thingiverse, you can bring it right into your 3D printer file.
00:41:26
Speaker
But you can also bring it into an intermediate step of, and I use Tinkercad, which is also an online free service, which I'll talk about at a later date. But basically, I took these things I got off of Thingiverse, modified them slightly with Tinkercad, added some stuff to them.
00:41:41
Speaker
And now I'm printing them. I printed the business card holder yesterday. It looks fantastic. As with a lot of things in 3D printing, sometimes you got to do a little post prep to it if you want it to really be polished, which means probably this evening when I get home, I'm going to run a little 220 grit sandpaper over the top of it because
00:41:58
Speaker
3D printing is a series of layers and those plastic layers are hot and plastic expands, contracts, does different things as it heats up and then cools down. And you end up with these almost imperceptible ridges depending on the accuracy with which you used. But anyway, those are topics for another discussion. But I just wanted to bring up Thingiverse because even if you don't have a 3D printer, you can find stuff on Thingiverse and then actually just send it to print. It's almost like Amazon, except
00:42:28
Speaker
You send it to a printer and they send you back a 3D printed object. I've got a couple quick follow-ups for you. What would it take between downloading this file? I mean, I'm assuming that you spent hours looking for just the right one. So once you found that one and you downloaded it, what was the turnaround time between downloading it, uploading it to Tinkercad, fiddling with it there, and getting ready for the printer?
00:42:53
Speaker
The whole process between downloading it and getting it ready for the printer was maybe 10 minutes. Because I've used these before, so I kind of know what I'm doing. And I knew exactly what kind of modifications I wanted to make. These are for my WildNote business cards. So I just used the text option in Tinkercad, wrote the word WildNote.
00:43:11
Speaker
Found the right font, took a minute to figure out whether I want it to be recessed as holes or raised up above the platform. I chose to have it raised up above the platform. And I had to get that depth right. But it's all pretty straightforward once you've been using it. It's a super easy, Tinkercad is super easy to use. And it's just, once you've done that, then you just export the file and simply just open it in Cura for Ultimaker. And if you're not doing anything special,
00:43:37
Speaker
I just used some of the default settings and I changed them ever so slightly based on experience and then save it to an SD card. And then I bring it down to the printer and had to change it. It took longer to change out the color, like the plastic in the printer to my plastic from the one that was here at the collective to then it did really to like create the file.
00:43:58
Speaker
because the printer's gotta heat up, you gotta pull it out, and then it's gotta heat my plastic back up, and then spit it out, and you gotta set it up, and all that stuff. And then you gotta load the file, and that takes a minute, depending on the size of the file. I mean, if you know what you're doing, all that takes longer than to just download from Thingiverse, even modify with Tinkercad slightly, and then get ready for printing, so pretty quick.
00:44:19
Speaker
Great, great. Not to derail this too much, but Tinkercad, I've mentioned before because we use it here in the sixth grade for a project that actually relates to archaeology. It's a pretty cool little program. If you haven't checked that out, I might as well do that too. Have you ever submitted anything up to Thingiverse?
00:44:43
Speaker
No, I've never, well, the things I've made were one of them, I'm hoping to get some kind of patent on later on in life. Um, so, so not that, uh, but really I've just modified things I've brought down, brought down from Thingiverse to kind of suit my needs. So I haven't really somewhat invented something that I thought other people could use and then put it up on the Thingiverse yet. I haven't, hadn't really gone down that road yet.
00:45:06
Speaker
One of my coworkers here, and again, this is way off topic, but he does a lot of gaming, video games, and he hosts competitions and things. And there is a whole series of different 3D printed cases holders for the Nintendo Switch.
00:45:24
Speaker
to keep people from, you know, absconding with it at one of these events or from popping out parts of it and stealing bits of it. And so he's been working on his spare time, like his lunchtime and such. I see him constantly futzing around in Tinkercad trying to make the perfect box or case or security device of some kind. So I'm going to have to ask him once he's done, if he plans on submitting that back up to Thingiverse, because I think the first couple that he experimented with or once he got from there.
00:45:54
Speaker
Some of the more fun things I've printed were related to gaming. I had a couple of friends that were way into gaming. And one of the things I printed was a Cthulhu dice tower. And I need to know a dice tower were a thing. Like, I guess I'm not, I'm not like a board gamer like that. And I, apparently for those that don't know a dice tower or something, you just drop your dice into and through a series of, um, like
00:46:14
Speaker
basically ledges and things like that. It basically randomized those, the rolling of a dice, right? Exactly. Yeah. It comes out the bottom and then, you know, you, you deal with them there, but this thing was enormous. It was like at the size limits of this 3d printer that we've got. It was probably six or seven inches tall and just this monstrosity looking thing, the Cthulhu dice tower, go on to Thingiverse and look at the Cthulhu dice tower. It's terrifying. And the 3d printer did an amazing job at it. And so it was, it was really fun. I'm intrigued.
00:46:44
Speaker
Well, we're on the idea of experimenting, of being a little creative. The app that I've got today is
00:46:59
Speaker
I'm not going to say anything good about it, but I don't want to be mean about it because I kind of got the feeling it's one of a series of a student's iOS apps that he was experimenting with. It's made by Yasashi Matsuo. It's called Moncel Viewer. Now, I came across this because
00:47:19
Speaker
I had just a wild hair as an idea that crossed my mind and I did search and I actually wound up on a discussion thread from an old post that you had on Team Black about a different Munsell viewer. Then I decided to go look to see if that one was still around. It apparently isn't, but there's this one. It's a free app. It's iOS only. The interface is really rudimentary and hard to
00:47:48
Speaker
really hard to grok because the buttons are text, there's little things in brackets, mem, mem, arrow to file, files to, you know, that maybe might make sense, but they didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The main interface for it, if you can find it, is a series of tiles with the Munsell numbers on them. You know, and you can kind of scroll horizontally through and, geez, I can't even find where they are now.
00:48:15
Speaker
Yeah, Munsell color chart, there we go. And so I'm scrolling through and they're different kind of triangles of little square tiles. The most desaturated, most gray ones on the left and the most heavily saturated ones off to the right. And then there's a box that you can drag over to choose whatever color you're looking at. So at the moment I'm choosing 2.5R46.
00:48:42
Speaker
Some of the things that are weird about it are the box that you drag over doesn't grab the color in the middle of the box. It grabs the one that's under the upper left corner. There's so many rough edges to this program that, again, it's not useful for anybody except for maybe for the programmer learning to program. But it did get me thinking.
00:49:03
Speaker
And some of the discussions in that thread that you had, and this is from 2012, I believe. Yeah. So it's been around a while. Some of the discussions were complaining about things that are still valid, like color fidelity on a device versus the chips in that expensive Munsell book that you've got.
00:49:23
Speaker
That's a serious problem. But I look at these and I think, geez, the main thing for me with a Munsell is the consistency and reproducibility. And so I feel like I would love to have something that worked kind of in between, that you could use it as a way to quickly get you in the right zone of the Munsell. I think that the difference when you choose between 2.5 or 5 slash 8 and 5 slash 10,
00:49:51
Speaker
Yeah, if you're using them on cell right, your lighting is such that you're getting that fairly accurate. But I think that the difference in that in most cases is not going to be actually significant. And I think that people's perception of color is variable enough that no two people are necessarily going to see it the same.
00:50:15
Speaker
I don't want to go way off into the weeds on to the problems and benefits of Munsell, because they're widely known and widely discussed in archaeology. But I do feel like you could take a device that would put some kind of a shield around it, and device, I mean your phone, and use the camera.
00:50:38
Speaker
and use the flash on there so it's got a consistent lighting, have it key in on a few chips to start with out of the real book so that it can calibrate itself, and then use that to get a color calibration or a color reading off of whatever it is, a soil or ceramic or whatever that you're trying to get a Menzel reading for.
00:51:01
Speaker
Again, this if you feel like it's going to cost you exactly zero dollars to download this program and take you a few minutes to poke around with it until you find out that it's really hard to use. But it might get those gears turning and I think that for somebody who's so inclined to rethink how one could use a phone
00:51:19
Speaker
as a replacement or at least a temporary replacement for a Munsell color book. It'd be a really interesting project or series of projects. Yeah, so you're totally right. I'm glad you found that little discussion that we had because
00:51:36
Speaker
I had found the app, like you said, and that was, I mean, like you said, five, six years ago. And I mean, iPhones and other devices, sure they were coming out with better screens and things like that, but, and they're even way better now. But I think the arguments back then are somewhat still valid. One of the ones about color fidelity, I think depending on the newness of your device, these color retina displays, especially starting with the iPhone 10 and the iPhone line,
00:52:04
Speaker
They've got true color displays. And so that being said, it's probably more similar to the chips that are found in the actual Munsell book. But here's the thing, like you said, Paul, variability in what people look at, that's the big thing. And I think even if you're using the Munsell book, the actual Munsell book,
00:52:22
Speaker
The best practice on any site when you're selling a lot of soil is to have one person do it. And that way, at least you've got consistency across the site. And that's the thing I always advocated. And if that one person happens to be using an iPhone to do their month, so well, I think you'll still get consistency of your answers. And does anybody really care if it's a difference of 10 wire, you know, three, four to 10 wire, three, five, you know, or something like that? I mean, there's.
00:52:45
Speaker
You're talking about shades here, and really you're looking at color variability across the site to indicate soil changes across the site. And as long as you have the same person doing that, you could call that color George and the other color Fred, and it just doesn't matter, right? It just doesn't matter.
00:53:02
Speaker
I would imagine, too, if you're looking at a soil profile from geology websites, like a USDA geology website or something like that, and you're saying, oh, I'm expecting this color. There's probably some plus or minus variation in that as well, just because they're not stupid. They know that's going to happen.
00:53:19
Speaker
I don't know, I'm encouraged by apps like this and I think we're getting there and I think with apps like this and the idea of having a Moncel on your smartphone combined with the slow but surely growing rise of augmented reality glasses and augmented reality on phones is that I think we're getting to the point where you're going to look at or point a camera at a soil and it's going to be basically a spectrometer on your face and it's just going to tell you the Moncel. So I think we're heading that direction.
00:53:47
Speaker
Anyway, that's kind of a big idea there. And I'm glad people are still putting stuff like this out. Yeah, no, again, I didn't want to pick on this particular developer. It looks to be an experiment. And kudos to him for putting it out there for the world to see. I don't think I would have the guts to do that, to put something that's clearly somewhat half baked and just
00:54:13
Speaker
let anybody download it and play with it and talk about it on their podcast and complain about it. And it's better than anything I could do because I can't program an iPhone. But, you know, again, I do look at it and I see, you know, it gets those gears turning. It gets the juices flowing, kind of like reading Alexi's article got you back into wanting to do some 3D printing. I see this and I'm like, ah, there's some really interesting ways that one could make
00:54:43
Speaker
a color viewer, let's call it a Munsell replacement or Munsell replacement just for point of argument here out of out of their phone. And yeah, there are ways that it would work better and ways that would work worse. But, you know, it's it's a discussion worth having is experiments worth doing, I think. Yeah, absolutely. So well, we'll link to the actual first time I wrote about that app was on the
00:55:12
Speaker
blog post number 91 of the Random Access Science blog that I used to write before I really get into the podcast. And I'll link to that in the show notes, but I've got other stuff on Moncel on there as well. So if you use the search bar on the right, on the Random Access Science blog, which is digtech-llc.com forward slash blog.
00:55:28
Speaker
then you can see several articles I did on Munsell, including one cell for the Munsell blog. I did a blog post for the Munsell blog. It was an invited post, so that was pretty cool. Oh, that's cool. Anyway, that's it for this week. Check out the links in the show notes for the apps of the days that we had. And hey, if you do 3D print anything from Thingiverse, or if you know I'm gonna meet you at a conference and you wanna print something,
00:55:55
Speaker
Send it to me all ready to go. I'll print it out here. I've got orange green and I think magenta and I think I have black in like white accessible to me too if they're here.
00:56:06
Speaker
And I'll print it out, and I'll bring it to a conference for you. So look for me at the Society for California Archaeology Conference in early March in Sacramento, California, and then in Albuquerque, New Mexico this year at the Society for American Archaeology Conference in mid-April. So you want something 3D printed, I'll do it. They're light, and I can stick it right in my suitcase. So that's great. Well, thanks a lot, Paul, for this episode, and thanks for setting up that interview with Alexei. Thanks, Chris. Talk to you in a couple weeks. Sounds good.
00:56:39
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:57:04
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:57:26
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.