Volunteers help British Museum in crowdsourcing archeology project

Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, 18-08-2014

A 3D plastic model of a 3,000-year-old bronze axe – stored in the British Museum since it was found more than 30 years ago at Jevington, East Sussex – has been printed out in a public library in Washington DC through a unique experiment in crowdsourcing archaeology. Volunteers worldwide are logging on to help transcribe more than 30,000 handwritten catalogue cards dating back to the late 18th century, and making digital photographs of thousands of ancient bronze objects so they can be stitched together to form 3D images.The catalogue records and the images – which are freely available in return for the volunteers’ help and are starting to appear on T-shirts and as miniature axe-head jewellery – will form one of the largest databases of prehistoric metalwork in the world.There will be no copyright on the objects or the information, and the project is entirely built on open-source software, so could be copied anywhere. Producing the axe at an archaeology open day in Washington DC was the idea of volunteer Joseph Koivisto, a research assistant at the Catholic University of America.

Daniel Pett, of the British Museum, who jointly leads the MicroPast project with Andrew Bevan, of University College London, said: “There’s something quite magical about the idea of an object that is still safely in our stores being given to a child to hold and experience so far away.”

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