"Reverse Engineering a Lost Culture", Input/Output, ME Departments, July 2005

input/output

by Harry Hutchinson, Executive Editor

Reverse Engineering a Lost Culture

You don't hear much about the Samnites these days. They were one of those peoples who had the hard luck of sharing the Italian peninsula with the ancient Romans. So only fragments remain of their culture.

Until recently, the Samnites' reputation has been based on reports left by their Latin-speaking neighbors, who wiped them out. In recent years, though, about 300 surprising fragments of pottery have turned up at a site in ancient Samnium, in central Italy. The pieces show that the Samnites, like so many of history's conquered folk, enjoyed a much higher level of sophistication than their conquerors would have us believe. Present-day scholars studying the Samnite artifacts are using modern engineering tools to put together a clearer picture of an ancient achievement.

Since 1999, the Sangro Valley Project has searched for remains of the Samnites at Monte Pallano in Italy's Abruzzo region. The project is headed by Susan Kane of Oberlin College in the United States and by Edward Bispham of Oxford University in England.

Scans of ancient tile fragments were assembled in a computer. The file will form the basis of a mold to recreate the original casting.

The team has found some 300 broken pieces of terracotta statues and wall plaques associated with a Samnite religious sanctuary from the second or third century B.C. The majority of the bits are from plaques molded with a motif of two dolphins facing across a floral ornament. The plaques once adorned the walls of the sanctuary, but at some point the terracotta was broken up and used as fill to build a terrace. The plaques were Hellenistic—in other words, linked to the mainstream culture of the Mediterranean world at the time—and better made than anyone expected of the Samnites, who have been called rustic at best and savage at worst.

"No one expected such quality," Kane said. "They were more sophisticated than they have been given credit for."

The project hopes to reconstruct as much of the lost building as possible, beginning with the ornamental plaques. Early in the excavation, in 2001, the motif was drawn by hand from the fragments available at the time. The left side was a mirror of the right.

A year later, 20 pieces were photographed for a reconstruction. The pieces came from different plaques, mismatched in size because the terracotta shrank as it dried and molds varied, so the photos were rescaled to fit together.

In 2003, an archaeology student with a minor in computing, Masana Amamiya, went to Italy to scan 76 fragments with a Konica Minolta Vivid 900 digital laser scanner, bought with a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The scanner is used commercially for reverse engineering and for monitoring the uniformity of manufactured goods. Konica Minolta recommends it for modeling artworks and artifacts, as well.

In this case, the scans—which consist of thousands of points recording where light reflected off the surface of the subject—were processed and assembled using Geomagic Studio reverse engineering software from Raindrop Geomagic of Research Triangle Park, N.C. This software creates 3-D computer renderings of the pieces. According to Kane, a professor of art history, images were assembled in the computer to recreate a full plaque, which will be converted into a CAD file to make a physical replica.

Sam Carrier, the Sangro Valley Group's lead information technician, said he has spoken to a rapid prototyping company about building sample plaques. Carrier, an associate professor of psychology at Oberlin, is Kane's husband. He is an experimental psychologist with an interest in perception, particularly vision and hearing, so the visual reconstruction touches on his area of expertise. He also gets to spend summers in Italy instead of Ohio.

Kane, Carrier, and Amamiya have written a paper, "A 3-Dimensional Reconstruction of a Hellenistic Terracotta Plaque," that describes this portion of their work.

According to Kane, the group hopes to learn more about ancient manufacturing techniques as a result of the reconstruction. What's more, the project will reassemble a broken record of culture and make it tangible, putting our time quite literally in touch with a lost bit of the past.