About the Project

The Hampson Archeological Museum State Park collection represents one of the world's most extraordinary collections of American Indian artistic expression as well as a major source of data on the lives and history of late pre-Columbian peoples of the Mississippi River Valley. The collections at the museum are the result of extensive excavations of the Nodena Site as well as excavations at other sites in the region by Dr James K. Hampson, and work by others including the University of Alabama and the University of Arkansas.

While the museum and its collections are well known in select archeological circles, its extraordinary materials are not widely known. The Virtual Hampson Museum Project was initiated to improve the visibility and accessibility of these materials – making them more available to both public and scholars. The Virtual Hampson Museum was completed by CAST in 2010 and was the first of its kind to make a large collection of 3D digital objects publicly accessible. The project was made possible through the generous financial support of the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council and the assistance of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, the Arkansas Department of Heritage, and the Arkansas Archeological Survey.

The Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resource Council was established in 1987 to manage and distribute grants from the Natural and Cultural Resources Grants and Trust Fund. The fund is managed for the acquisition, management, and stewardship of State-owned lands, or the preservation of State-owned historic sites, buildings, structures, or objects which the ANCRC determines to be of value for recreation or conservation purposes. said properties to be used, preserved, and conserved for the benefit of present and future generations.

Digital Reuse of the Hampson Digital Collection

There are many rationales for the creation of digital representations of cultural heritage materials. Among these are preservation of a representation when the original may be repatriated or otherwise accessible, increased access since physical travel is not needed, increased capabilities for various digital metrical analyses, increased opportunities for comparative analyses, potential for 3D printing of objects for class and public use, and more. From the scholarly community’s perspective, perhaps one of the most compelling, is the linked aspects of reproducibility and reuse. Freely accessible digital objects can readily be reused in analyses by other researchers allowing them to conduct repeated studies. The broader situation has been well summarized by Shiri (2017):

The implications of using, reusing and repurposing digital content and collections, in this open and information rich environment, are profound and multifaceted, cutting across many different institutional contexts such as libraries, archives and museums, as well as numerous disciplines and a wide range of user communities and audience types. Access to digital libraries, in particular, has been closely associated with and discussed in regards to such measures of impact, value and usefulness.

Within archaeology and cultural heritage in 2018 an entire issue of the journal Advances in Archeological Practice (2018:6(2)) focused on digital reuse.

Since its initial publication in 2010 the Hampson Virtual Museum collection has seen remarkable digital reuse. We have identified more than 40 articles and chapters where the Hampson digital materials have been reused in analysis and research. The primary role of the materials has been in the development and assessment of digital analytical methods to study archeological/cultural heritage collections and well as the broader computer science issues of 3D object identification and search. Early on the collection was seen as valuable reference set for scientists developing techniques for object identification and search, particular by scholars in the European Union. In 2016 the Hampson materials were made part of the Shape Retrieval Contest (SHREC) collection. This is a collection of 3D objects that is used to assess and validate various 3D retrieval methods. A contest is held every year in association with the Eurographics Conference.

With the updates to the Virtual Hampson Museum website in 2019, the project team made the decision to remove the ability to download the 3D object models. While we have seen remarkable research and scholarly endeavors using the virtual collection, we have also witnessed misuse of the 3D models and violations of our clearly stated Creative Commons licensing. Under the original licensing, it was stated that the models were not to be used for commercial purposes without the express written approval of the Quapaw tribe, the most commonly recognized descendant population. As technology evolved rapidly in the decade after initial publication, our ideas regarding digital model ownership also evolved, and we became more aware of cultural sensitivities associated with some of the objects in the collection. For these reasons, we removed the ability to download the objects and transitioned to the 3DHOP viewer for direct viewing and manipulation of objects in browser.

The Virtual Hampson Museum in the Literature

Agosto, Eros, and Leandro Bornaz. 2017. “3D Models in Cultural Heritage: Approaches for Their Creation and Use.” International Journal of Computational Methods in Heritage Science (IJCMHS) 1 (1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJCMHS.2017010101

Andreadis, A., R. Gregor, I. Sipiran, P. Mavridis, G. Papaioannou, and T. Schreck. 2015. “Fractured 3D Object Restoration and Completion.” In ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Posters, 74:1–74:1. SIGGRAPH ’15. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2787626.2792633

Biasotti, Silvia, Andrea Cerri, Chiara Catalano, Bianca Falcidieno, Maria Torrente, Stuart Middleton, Leo Dorst, Ilan Shimshoni, Ayellet Tal, and Dominic Oldman. 2016. “Report on Shape Analysis and Matching and on Semantic Matching.” Monograph. March 16, 2016. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/392697/

Biasotti, Silvia, Andrea Cerri, Bianca Falcidieno, and Michela Spagnuolo. 2015. “3D Artifacts Similarity Based on the Concurrent Evaluation of Heterogeneous Properties.” J. Comput. Cult. Herit. 8 (4): 19:1–19:19. https://doi.org/10.1145/2747882

Campetti, Casey, Maija Glasier-Lawson, Matthew Kalos, Hilary Miller, Megan Springate, Stephanie Sullivan, and Katie Turner. 2014. Interpretative actions for archeological resources. Park Break Perspectives. The George Wight Society. Handcock, MI. 19 pgs

Cook, Matt. 2018. “Virtual Serendipity: Preserving Embodied Browsing Activity in the 21st Century Research Library.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 44 (1): 145–49

Dimou, Dimitrious. 2018. “Identifying 3D Objects from Maps Depth.” MA Thesis, Greece: Polytechnic School, University of Patras, Municipality of Dimitrios. Greece

Dimou, D. and K. Moustakas, “A Framework for 3D Object Segmentation and Retrieval Using Local Geometric Surface Features,” in 2018 International Conference on Cyberworlds (CW), 2018, 102–7. https://doi.org/10.1109/CW.2018.00028

Felicísimo, Ángel M., María-Eugenia Polo, and Juan A. Peris. 2013. “Three-Dimensional Models of Archaeological Objects: From Laser Scanners to Interactive Pdf Documents.” Technical Briefs in Historical Archaeology 7: 13–18

Freeman, Mark. 2015. “‘Not for Casual Readers:’ An Evaluation of Digital Data from Virginia Archaeological Websites.” Masters Theses, August. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/3476

Gregor, Robert, Danny Bauer, Ivan Sipiran, Panagiotis Perakis, and Tobias Schreck. 2015. “Automatic 3D Object Fracturing for Evaluation of Partial Retrieval and Object Restoration Tasks - Benchmark and Application to 3D Cultural Heritage Data.” The Eurographics Association. https://doi.org/10.2312/3dor.20151049

Gregor, Robert, Christof Mayrbrugger, Pavlos Mavridis, Benjamin Bustos, and Tobias Schreck. 2017. Cross-Modal Content-Based Retrieval for Digitized 2D and 3D Cultural Heritage Artifacts. The Eurographics Association. https://doi.org/10.2312/gch.20171302

Ioannakis, George, Anestis Koutsoudis, Fotis Arnaoutoglou, Chairi Kiourt, and Christodoulos Chamzas. 2017. “On Structure-From-Motion Application Challenges: Good Practices.” International Journal of Computational Methods in Heritage Science (IJCMHS) 1 (2): 47–57. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJCMHS.2017070103

Kaimaris, Dimitris, Charalampos Georgiadis, Petros Patias, and Vassilis Tsioukas. 2017. “Aerial and Remote Sensing Archaeology.” International Journal of Computational Methods in Heritage Science (IJCMHS) 1 (1): 58–76. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJCMHS.2017010104

Kiourt, Chairi, Anestis Koutsoudis, Fotis Arnaoutoglou, Georgia Petsa, Stella Markantonatou, and George Pavlidis. 2015. “A Dynamic Web-Based 3D Virtual Museum Framework Based on Open Data.” In 2015 Digital Heritage, 647–50. Granada, Spain: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/DigitalHeritage.2015.7419589

Kiourt, Chairi, Anestis Koutsoudis, and George Pavlidis. 2016. “DynaMus: A Fully Dynamic 3D Virtual Museum Framework.” Journal of Cultural Heritage 22 (November): 984–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2016.06.007

Koutsoudis, Anestis, and Christodoulos Chamzas. 2011. “3D Pottery Shape Matching Using Depth Map Images.” Journal of Cultural Heritage 12 (2): 128–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2010.12.003

Koutsoudis, Anestis, George Ioannakis, Ioannis Pratikakis, and Christos Chamzas. 2015. “RETRIEVAL 3D: An On-Line Content-Based Retrieval Performance Evaluation Tool.” The Eurographics Association. https://doi.org/10.2312/3dor.20151062

Koutsoudis, Anestis, George Pavlidis, Vassiliki Liami, Despoina Tsiafakis, and Christodoulos Chamzas. 2010. “3D Pottery Content-Based Retrieval Based on Pose Normalisation and Segmentation.” Journal of Cultural Heritage 11 (3): 329–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2010.02.002

Koutsoudis, A., G. Pavlidis, and C. Chamzas. 2010. “Detecting Shape Similarities in 3D Pottery Repositories.” In 2010 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Semantic Computing, 548–52. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSC.2010.50

Koutsoudis, Anestis, Ioannis Pratikakis, and Christodoulos Chamzas. 2013. “On 3D Object Retrieval Benchmarking.” 3D Research 4 (4): 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/3DRes.04(2013)3

Limp, Fred, Angelia Payne, Katie Simon, Snow Winters, and Jackson Cothren. 2011. “Developing a 3-D Digital Heritage Ecosystem: From Object to Representation and the Role of a Virtual Museum in the 21st Century.” Internet Archaeology 30

Limp, William Fred. 2016. “Measuring the Face of the Past and Facing the Measurement.” In Digital Methods and Remote Sensing in Archaeology, 349–369. Springer

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 (Maximova, Tatyana Evgenievna. 2013. “Virtual Museums vs Traditional Museums: The Benefits of Virtual Exhibits.” Historical, Philosophical, Political and Legal Sciences, Cultural Studies and Art History. Questions of theory and practice, no. 4–3: 109–111.)

Papaioannou, Georgios, Tobias Schreck, Anthousis Andreadis, Pavlos Mavridis, Robert Gregor, Ivan Sipiran, and Konstantinos Vardis. 2017. “From Reassembly to Object Completion: A Complete Systems Pipeline.” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 10 (2): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3009905

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Pratikakis, Ioannis, Michalis A. Savelonas, Pavlos Mavridis, Georgios Papaioannou, Konstantinos Sfikas, Fotis Arnaoutoglou, and Dirk Rieke-Zapp. 2018. “Predictive Digitisation of Cultural Heritage Objects.” Multimedia Tools and Applications 77 (10): 12991–21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4928-y

Pratikakis, I., M. A. Savelonas, F. Arnaoutoglou, G. Ioannakis, A. Koutsoudis, T. Theoharis, M. T. Tran, et al. 2016. “SHREC’16 Track: Partial Shape Queries for 3D Object Retrieval.” In Eurographics Workshop on 3D Object Retrieval. http://ralph.cs.cf.ac.uk/papers/Geometry/shrec16.pdf

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———. 2016. “Fisher Encoding of Differential Fast Point Feature Histograms for Partial 3D Object Retrieval.” Pattern Recognition 55 (July): 114–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2016.02.003

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