Artifact3-D: New software for accurate, objective and efficient 3D analysis and documentation of archaeological artifacts

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Artifact3-D: New software for accurate, objective and efficient 3D analysis and documentation of archaeological artifacts Leore Grosman ID*, Antoine Muller ID, Itamar Dag, Hadas Goldgeier ID, Ortal Harush, Gadi Herzlinger ID, Keren Nebenhaus, Francesco Valetta ID, Talia Yashuv, Nir Dick Institute of Archaeology, Mount Scopus, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Grosman L, Muller A, Dag I, Goldgeier H, Harush O, Herzlinger G, et al. (2022) Artifact3-D: New software for accurate, objective and efficient 3D analysis and documentation of archaeological artifacts. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0268401. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268401 Editor: Peter F. Biehl, University at Buffalo - The State University of New York, UNITED STATES Received: March 7, 2022 Accepted: April 20, 2022 Published: June 16, 2022 Copyright: © 2022 Grosman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The Software Artifact3-D and manual are available from the Open Science Framework repository: https://sourceforge. net/projects/artifact3-d/. Funding: This study was supported by The Robert W. Wilson Charitable Trust and the Yad Hanadiv Foundation in the form of funds to LG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Abstract The study of artifacts is fundamental to archaeological research. The features of individual artifacts are recorded, analyzed, and compared within and between contextual assemblages. Here we present and make available for academic-use Artifact3-D, a new software package comprised of a suite of analysis and documentation procedures for archaeological artifacts. We introduce it here, alongside real archaeological case studies to demonstrate its utility. Artifact3-D equips its users with a range of computational functions for accurate measurements, including orthogonal distances, surface area, volume, CoM, edge angles, asymmetry, and scar attributes. Metrics and figures for each of these measurements are easily exported for the purposes of further analysis and illustration. We test these functions on a range of real archaeological case studies pertaining to tool functionality, technological organization, manufacturing traditions, knapping techniques, and knapper skill. Here we focus on lithic artifacts, but the Artifact3-D software can be used on any artifact type to address the needs of modern archaeology. Computational methods are increasingly becoming entwined in the excavation, documentation, analysis, database creation, and publication of archaeological research. Artifact3-D offers functions to address every stage of this workflow. It equips the user with the requisite toolkit for archaeological research that is accurate, objective, repeatable and efficient. This program will help archaeological research deal with the abundant material found during excavations and will open new horizons in research trajectories. 1. Introduction The study of artifacts is fundamental to archaeological research. The features of individual artifacts are recorded, analyzed, and compared within and between contextual assemblages. The results of these endeavors form the basis of the higher-level interpretations and reconstructions of past human behavior, cultural evolution, and history. Hence, without precise, objective, and repeatable data acquisition methods that comprehensively record key artifact attributes and metrics, the evidence gathered from the abundant material found during excavations is problematic. PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268401 June 16, 2022 1 / 24 PLOS ONE Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Artifact3-D: New software for 3D analysis and documentation of archaeological artifacts Interpreting the results of artifact assemblages subjected to various analyses, mostly in a comparative nature, regularly revolves around the identification and description of variability (or the lack thereof). In the most basic sense, variability in the attributes of artifacts over time or space is regularly interpreted as indicating technological, cultural, or functional distinction and transition, while homogeneity is interpreted as indicating continuity or influence [e.g. 1–6]. Thus, the degree and nature of variability in artifact attributes form the basis for archaeological interpretations of the past. How well we measure this variability is therefore crucial to the discipline. Until recently, the capacity to document and express relevant, culturally indicative morphological features of artifacts in a quantitative manner and high-resolution were extremely limited. Solutions such as classification into discrete categories, namely typology, are based on qualitative, intuitive notions which are described lexically and lack formal, quantitatively measurable definitions [7–9]. The lack of continuous quantitative variables substantially reduces both the statistical power and the overall credibility of subsequent analyses performed on assemblages. In contrast, the acquisition of quantitative data was limited to simple linear distance measurements, such as length, width, and thickness. These measurements not only suffer from low accuracy with respect to their position relative to the artifact and each other, but also fail to capture the complex morphological phenomena in artifacts, regularly used in cultural reasoning and interpretation [10–12]. The exponential increase in computing capacities, coupled with the proliferation of 3D digital scanning technologies in the past few years render computational approaches as the natural candidates for addressing these problems. These offer an efficient and accurate solution to digitally record the morphological information of archaeological artifacts to make it suitable for further methods of computational display and analysis [13, 14]. At the Computational Archaeology Laboratory of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, we have worked throughout the last decade towards technological innovations in response to relevant archaeological questions, in a team consisting of archaeologists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists. 3D modelling technology along with computational analytical methods are harnessed to describe and analyze lithic and other artifacts. These are used to provide innovative research methodologies for obtaining new insights into questions for which standard avenues of research have reached an impasse. We have developed methods to compare artifacts based on morphological attributes derived from their whole 3D shape at different levels of resolut (...truncated)