The meeting at George Mason University’s Innovation Exchange between anthropology professor Justin Lowry and Brian Davies was supposed to be strictly technical.
Davies, a junior biology major, is helping Lowry create 3-D printouts of an ancient footprint from a historic site in a suburb of Managua, Nicaragua.
It wasn’t long, though, before the conversation went from academic to affecting.
“As archeologists and anthropologists, it is our job to be stewards of the past,” Lowry said.
To which Davies added, “It’s like we’re bringing the past of humanity back to life.”
Actually, what they are doing is continuing a story that began more than a year ago, when Lowry and two George Mason students, in collaboration with Clemente Guido Martinez, Managua’s director of cultural and historic heritage, helped preserve more than a thousand 2,100-year-old footprints, set in volcanic ash, that were threatened by a flood.
The 3-D printouts, done in the Innovation Exchange, a student-run maker space hosted by Mason’s School of Business, have multiple purposes. They are, at root, a historical record and a hedge against losing the footprints to a natural disaster.
But the largest planned printouts, as much as 9 feet by 9 feet and displaying hundreds of footprints, could be used as an exhibit by the museum at the excavation site, which is still being repaired after the flood. Smaller 3-foot-by-3-foot printouts of a single footprint could become six-piece jigsaw puzzles to give museum visitors a hands-on experience.
Lowry even envisions a traveling exhibit.
“Having this data is a way for us not to lose the knowledge about the past,” he said.
Amy Best, chair of Mason’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, called it “anthropology at its finest.”
“It absolutely promotes global engagement and provides opportunities for students to see direct real-world impacts,” she said. “It is innovative, and that is at the core of anthropology and anthropological education.”
It’s also just really cool, said Jack Bolger, one of the students who went to Nicaragua with Lowry.
“I like to think it changed me a bit,” said the junior film and video studies major, who joked he felt like Indiana Jones during the six-week archeological dig. “It gave me an appreciation for preserving ancient stuff. I like to see preservation of history I can see and touch and hold and fix.”
And even put together as a jigsaw puzzle.