Smithsonian.com

Last Monday, April 15, the National Museum of Natural History actually did come to life after hours. Not with mummies or miniature armies, of course, but with a small group of volunteers, a bunch of fancy-looking equipment and two guys at the forefront of museum digitization.

Adam Metallo and Vince Rossi, of the 3D Lab in the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office, work with laser scanners to create high resolution, three-dimensional digital models of objects and places around the Smithsonian Institution. Last week, they teamed up with curators at the Natural History Museum for the second of two nights of scanning the Dinosaur Hall, the museum’s iconic galleries that house prehistoric fossils from the ancient seas through the Ice Age. The hall is scheduled to close in 2014 for a ground-up, multi-year renovation, so Metallo and Rossi, dubbed the “Laser Cowboys” by their colleagues, were brought in to capture the hall’s present arrangement before all the fossils are removed.

“The main purpose of 3D scanning an exhibit like this is to have an archive of what an exhibit of this era might have looked,” Metallo says. “This is a documentation for folks in the future to know what a museum experience here was like.”

The scanning has immediate uses as well. With accurate digital 3D models of T-Rex and his friends’ skeletons, curators and designers will have a much easier time envisioning the exhibition’s future iterations and testing out ideas for optimal arrangements. Paleontologists, too, will suddenly have access to fossils anytime, anywhere. “There’s one specimen that’s on display two stories up in the air,” Metallo says. “Now, instead of a researcher having to get up on a scissor lift to look at it, we can just email him the digital model.”

And if digital models aren’t enough, 3D scanning might soon allow anyone interested in fossils to get even closer to the real thing. “We’re seeing a real democratization of 3D printing along with 3D scanning,” says Rossi. “There are apps for iPhones that allow you to use a camera as a 3D scanning device. Pretty much any museum visitor could create a pretty decent model of a museum object, and potentially take that through a 3D printer. There’s still a fair amount of expertise required at the moment, but it’s going to be a lot more user-friendly in the next two or three years.”

In other words, it’s not inconceivable that you could print out your own stegosaurus skeleton for your living room on your home 3D printer someday.

Ultimately, Rossi and Metallo dream of digitizing all 137 million of the objects in the Smithsonian’s collections. Because only two percent of the objects are displayed in the Institution’s museums at any time—and many people never have the chance to see even those in person—precise replicas could be printed and sent to local museums across the country, or viewed digitally on a computer screen anywhere in the world.

As for future of the Dino Hall, Matthew Carrano, the museum’s curator of dinosauria, says his team is still in the early stages of planning exactly how the exhibit will look when it reopens in 2019, but that it definitely will strive to incorporate humans into the dinosaurs’ story. “The biggest thing I hope for in the new hall is that a visitor comes here and is inspired, amazed and interested in the history of life on earth, and understands that this history is still relevant to them today, and to the world today,” he explains. “There are problems we face as human beings that paleontology can help address. Dinosaurs didn’t exist by themselves; they were part of environments and ecosystems just like we are today. And that connection is really important to everything we’re going to show in this hall.”

To learn more about 3D scanning and printing at Smithsonian, check out Metallo and Rossi’s Facebook page, and follow them on twitter @3D_Digi_SI. To learn more about dinosaurs, check out the Natural History Museum’s dinosaur page.

Both male and female figures were portrayed with body art and tattoos, but females were typically shown with the decoration covering their shoulders and chest. In addition, her seated posture indicates she is of an elevated social status. Greater Nicoya female figure on a feline-effigy bench, AD 800–1200 Linea Vieja area, Costa Rica Pottery. All photos by Ernest Amoroso, courtesy of the American Indian Museum

Thousands of years old, the ceramics of Central America tell us a great deal about the societies who made them. Religious beliefs, gender dynamics, societal hierarchies–all of this lies encoded in the sculptural and pictorial choices of the people who made the more than 160 objects that comprise the American Indian Museum’s new exhibition, “Cerámica de los Ancestros: Central America’s Past Revealed,” opening March 29 in Washington, D.C.

Sponsored by both the museum and the Smithsonian’s Latino Center, the new bilingual exhibition is supported by more than two years of research and a thorough investigation of the American Indian Museum’s archaeological collections, some 12,000 pieces from the region, many of which have never been displayed in public. The show seeks to display the diversity of not only the objects, but also the cultures of Central America, and showcases 160 works crafted from gold, jade, copper, marble, shell and stone and dating from 1,000 B.C. to the present.

Kevin Gover, the museum’s director and Eduardo Díaz, the director of the Latino Center, write that the materials, “testify to the complexity of long-lived governments and social systems, and to the importance and sophistication of the art and science in the communities where they were made. They speak of the patience, sensitivity, and innovation of their makers.”

The exhibit covers seven major archeological regions, including Greater Nicoya, Central Caribbean, Greater Chiriquí and Greater Coclé.

While some pieces, particularly from the Maya, took on an abstracted quality, this pre-classic human-monkey figure shows a turn toward realism. Pre-Classic period Maya human-monkey figure, AD 200–300 Villa de Zaragoza, Chimaltenango Department, Guatemala Pottery

Jade and gold works round out the exhibit and show how artists worked across materials. Using a material like gold in Panama, even if locally produced, often signaled an exposure and knowledge of outside cultures, bolstering the owner’s authority. Greater Coclé pendant with warrior figures, AD 500–1200 Península de Azuero, Herrera Province, Panama

This elaborate piece of pottery is actually a musical instrument. Classic period Maya whistle representing a seated woman, AD 600–900 Quiché Department, Guatemala Pottery

Many ceramics were made by and for households but larger societies could support specialists. Greater Nicoya female figure from AD 800–1350 Near Rivas, Rivas Department, Nicaragua Pottery. Photo by Ernest Amoroso

A fearsome god of fire provides a contrast to the vessel’s likely contents. Heavy incisions carve the figure’s face into the surface in contrast to additive works which build form up from the surface. Lempa River vessel depicting the god of fire, AD 900–1200 San Salvador Department, El Salvador Pottery

The tripod form was a common one for vessels but here the artist plays with the form to help enhance the animal’s figure. Greater Nicoya tripod vessel in the form of an agouti, AD 1000–1350 Nicoya, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica Pottery

Drawing inspiration from the wildlife around them, Greater Nicoya artists incorporated figures like the crocodile into their work. Greater Nicoya crocodile jar, AD 1000–1350 Filadelfia, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica Pottery.

The exhibition will be open through February 1, 2015 at the American Indian Museum.

When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 B.C., he encountered the same problem many political leaders face today: How do rulers keep the peace?

Cyrus, the King of Persia, was in the midst of building the largest empire that the world had ever seen. By his death in 530 B.C., his reign would extend from present-day Turkey to India.

For Cyrus, establishing control over vast miles of land with peoples of different cultures, languages and faiths created numerous obstacles in unifying his kingdom. The king sought order, not more war. “It is the first time anyone has had to address that challenge,” says Neil MacGregor, director of London’s British Museum.

“As well as a transport system, as well as an economic system, as well as an administration, you need to have policy, an ideal of what you’re trying to do to control this empire,” he adds.

Cyrus’s solution can be found today on a football-shaped cylinder of baked clay: give people the freedom to practice whatever religion they please.

The Cyrus Cylinder, one of the most significant archaeological artifacts in history, travels here from the British Museum and makes its United States debut on Saturday, March 9, 2013, at the Sackler Gallery. Inscribed with cuneiform, one of the earliest known scripts, the text denounces Nabonidus, the displaced Babylonian King, and boasts of liberating Cyrus’s newly conquered people from religious persecution by restoring their temples, their temple goods and their ceremonial vessels; and sending prisoners and the enslaved home to worship their own gods. ”[I] returned [the people] to their settlements, and the gods of the land . . . I returned them unharmed to their cells, in the sanctuaries that make them happy,” Cyrus declares in the text. “I have enabled all the lands to live in peace.” (See the full translation here.)

“The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia” includes artifacts from Cyrus the Great’s vast Achaemenid Empire (550–331 BC), like this gold griffin-headed amulet from the region of Takht-i Kuwad, Tadjikistan. Photo courtesy of the Sackler Gallery.

Cyrus’s tolerant approach has had a lasting impact. According to MacGregor, “For Europeans and Americans in the 18th century, there is only one political problem: How do you avoid the wars of religion that had devastated Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries? How do you create a state where people don’t kill each other for their faith? Everybody goes back to Cyrus.”

The exhibition entitled, “The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia,” features quotes and historical artifacts that trace the generations of political thinkers inspired by Cyrus’s philosophy. Thomas Jefferson studied the life of Cyrus; he owned two copies of a biography of the king.

Julien Raby, director of the Sackler Gallery, hopes the exhibit will encourage visitors to appreciate how different cultures learn to value objects in different ways. “There isn’t a single story,” he explains. “It’s actually about looking at the way in which we constantly reinterpret, the way that different eras and different agendas take objects and project onto them.”

MacGregor thinks Cyrus’s legacy is particularly important today. “We are confronting in every one of our cities, in Europe and in America, a new kind of diversity—people of different ethnicities, languages, faiths, traditions trying to live together,” he says. “We don’t really have a model for this. But we all know that somebody once did.”

“The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia” is on view at the Sackler Gallery from March 9 to April 28, before making a nation-wide tour. For a list of locations and dates, visit the exhibition’s website.

To learn more about the cylinder itself, watch MacGregor detail its history and significance in a 2011 TED talk, “2,600 Years of History in One Object.”