Visualizing a Wired World’s Past

Faculty reflection on VCU Great Bike Race Book course. Course Description: This track will draw on archaeology, art and history to reveal the shared humanity of the UCI Road World Championships’ participants and the VCU community

Founding Monsters

The Founding Monsters comic book was created as a science-friendly graphical storytelling framework that tells the story of the Founding Fathers and their obsession with prehistoric megafauna, especially mastodons and giant ground sloths. Founding Monsters combines sequential art (e.g. comic book style) with historical and scientific data. The first mastodon (Mammut americanum) fossils were found in New York in the early 18th century. Later in the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson was sent fossils from what is now West Virginia for what were eventually identified as bones from a giant ground sloth (Megalonyx jeffersoni). The founding fathers, including not only Jefferson, but also Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, saw these and other isolated bones discovered in Kentucky, New York, and Virginia as critical to countering a notion that simply being in the Americas physically affected its inhabitants—animals, plants, and people—causing them to degenerate relative to their Old World counterparts. Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington all owned the fossils of Ice Age megafauna. Some of Jefferson’s mastodon and giant ground sloth fossils were collected by William Clark from Big Bone Lick at Jefferson’s request and these are preserved at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. While the fate of Washington’s mastodon fossils is unclear, a mastodon molar belonging to Franklin was found in property he owned in Philadelphia. However, even as more mastodon and giant ground sloth fossils were uncovered, they were not seen as a compelling counterpoint to the notion of American degeneracy—a complete or at least nearly complete skeleton was needed. In 1799, bones from a mastodon skeleton were discovered on a farm in Orange County, New York that elicited great interest from Jefferson and his compatriots, including Charles Willson Peale, a famous painter and owner of the first public museum in the U.S. In 1801, Peale traveled to New York to purchase the mastodon bones found two years earlier and the right to excavate more bones. As part of America’s first scientific excavation, he developed an ingenious pumping system consisting of a human-powered wooden wheel to remove water from his excavation areas, famously portrayed in his 1806 to 1808 painting Exhumation of the Mastodon. Peale recovered enough bones to reconstruct two mastodons, one of which was one of the first reconstructed fossil animals and displayed it in his museum in Philadelphia beginning on Christmas Eve in 1801.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/founding_monsters/1000/thumbnail.jp

Founding Monster Tales

The creative team behind the Founding Monsters comic book—Maggie Colangelo and Dr. Bernard K. Means—bring you Founding Monsters Tales. Founding Monsters Tales features all-new art by Maggie and explores and expands on themes in Founding Monsters. Meet again Moses Williams, an enslaved servant of the Peale family who not only helped reconstruct the first mastodon skeleton, but was an unheralded artist in his own right. Find out whether mastodons were meat eaters, and how they differed from mammoths. Learn whether Thomas Jefferson was correct in his interpretation of what he called “the great claw.” Discover what Jefferson thought Lewis and Clark would reveal during their explorations of the American west. Uncover why James Madison made measurements of weasels, some quite intimate in nature.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/founding_monsters/1001/thumbnail.jp

A Heart Pierced by a Narwhal Tusk and Other Sketches

A series of sketches and spot illustrations by artist Maggie Colangelo, Senior Graphics Artist for VCU\u27s Virtual Curation Laboratory. Many of the illustrations are related to various celebrations over the calendar year, usually tied to open houses in the lab.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/vcl_comics_pubs/1001/thumbnail.jp

Tales from the Virtual Curation Lab, Issue 01

Tales from the Virtual Curation Lab brings you fascinating graphic narratives inspired by artifacts, fossils, historic objects—and even one person—3D scanned by VCU’s Virtual Curation Laboratory. Read about an Ice Age camel that had its face ripped of by a bear, the world’s oldest ham, a vampire’s skull, and more!”--back coverhttps://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/vcl_comics_pubs/1002/thumbnail.jp

Morphological Variation in Three-Dimensional Printed Replicas

Employed primarily for outreach and education, the three-dimensional (3D) printer used in this analysis provides a means of producing tangible models of fragile and restricted-use specimens for students from a wide variety of disciplines, and is used here to produce prints associated with historic and prehistoric cultural objects. Recognizing that inconsistencies occur in 3D prints due to environmental variables, this exploratory effort was aimed at identifying the geometry that deviates most from the original scan data. A total of five replicas were printed then compared by calculating the gap distance between the nominal (original scan data) and measured data (scan of 3D printed replica) in Geomagic Control X. Results indicate that computer-aided inspection may prove useful in the refinement of 3D printing work flows, finishing, and the iterative refinement of 3D printer settings for specific real-world education- and outreach-based endeavors

Beyond Documentation: 3D Data in Archaeology

As the costs associated with the collection of 3D data continue to plummet, there is little doubt that the number of available archaeology-related 3D datasets will increase dramatically in the coming decade. While our analytical procedures continue to evolve as new applications are contemplated, analyses of 3D data are increasing in frequency within the archaeological literature. In this article, we seek to provide a brief overview of a few examples from our own research and explore some possibilities that may add value to existing collections. In the following pages, we discuss some of the ways that 3D data have been used in studies of morphometrics, public archaeology, excavation, and comparative endeavors

Health, community and development : towards a social psychology of participation

Population ageing is one of the major contemporary issues facing societies across the world. Originally framed as a major social and economic challenge, demographic ageing is now beginning to be seen as offering huge potential to individuals as well as to their communities. It is this positive potential that we explore in this issue by utilising two key disciplinary approaches—social gerontology and social/community psychology. In this introduction, we argue that focus on only one or the other of these perspectives is limiting. Instead, a more critical approach is needed that incorporates the strengths of both disciplines in order to build a more complete and stronger understanding of ageing and community. Thus, a focus on social gerontology highlights ageing issues and explores the diversity of older people and their interactions with community. By incorporating a social/community psychology approach, there is potential to complement this body of work through a deeper level of analysis around community, as well as individual and relational dimensions. The result is a special issue that brings together these two perspectives to address some of the shortcomings of approaching ageing through solely one disciplinary lens