Historical artefact reconstructor, pottery profiles, dating methods and licensed 3D sources in one tool
Build a ceramic vessel from a rotated profile or a flat artefact from a mirrored contour, work out its shrunk and fired weight, date it by radiocarbon, thermoluminescence or dendrochronology, then check which of seven open museum 3D collections actually license the use you have in mind before you export a watertight STL or 3MF.
Open the artefact reconstructor A free account opens this tool. The interface is in English and nothing you enter leaves your browser.How it works
Three steps from a profile or contour to a checked, exportable shape.
Pick a mode and build the shape
Choose a solid of revolution for a pottery vessel or a mirrored contour for a flat artefact such as an arrowhead or an axe, then drag the control points. The profile must grow monotonically in height; a point that doubles back is rejected before any mesh is built, with the exact point named so you know what to fix.
Run the checks that apply: material, dating, stratigraphy or breakage
Add wall thickness and material density to get a shrunk, fired weight, recover a rim diameter from a broken fragment by chord and sagitta, date the piece by radiocarbon, thermoluminescence or dendrochronology, or order stratigraphic layers by the law of superposition. Each mode runs on the same underlying shape, independently of the others.
Check the licence, scale for the plate, and export
Filter the seven open museum collections by era, region, artefact type and what you intend to do with the model, generate a TASL attribution line for the one you pick, then scale the reconstruction to your printer's build plate and download a watertight STL or 3MF.
Eleven modes across six stages of the work
Pick the mode that matches your task; the same reconstructed shape carries through material, dating and print preparation.
Built to show its working, not just a number
Archaeological reconstruction carries real uncertainty. The tool states where a figure comes from and where it stops being reliable, rather than hiding the gap behind a clean-looking result.
Every volume checked two independent ways
The solid of revolution is triangulated into a real mesh and its volume is also worked out analytically by the Pappus-Guldinus theorem on the exact 2D profile, with no polygon approximation of the circle. The two must agree within the error from the chosen number of radial segments; if they do not, the calculation is flagged broken, not the geometry itself. A profile that is not strictly monotonic in height is rejected before the mesh is built, with the exact control point named.
Incompatible licences are hidden, not flagged
State your era, region, artefact type and intended use, commercial included, and the tool filters seven open museum 3D collections down to the ones whose licence actually allows it. A collection under CC BY-NC-SA simply disappears from a commercial search rather than showing with a warning icon, because a licence mismatch here is treated as absolute, not a soft risk. Combining two models inherits the strictest term of either, and a share alike or no derivatives licence can block the combination outright.
Three dating methods, each with its own failure mode
Radiocarbon dating runs the same measured activity through two published half lives, Libby's 5568 years and the Cambridge 5730 years, so you see how much the choice of constant changes the calculated age for the same sample. The method's own precision runs out around 50,000 to 60,000 years, where activity becomes indistinguishable from background, so the input is capped at 50,000 years BP rather than returning a falsely precise number past that point. Thermoluminescence divides a palaeodose by a dose rate and refuses a zero or negative rate outright. Dendrochronology slides a Pearson correlation across a reference chronology and warns explicitly below about thirty rings, where short series produce misleadingly high correlations by chance.
STL and 3MF that are actually watertight
Every exported body, from a pottery revolve to a set of broken fragments, is built from the same closed mesh functions the 3D view itself uses: base and rim caps for a revolved vessel, front and back caps for an extruded flat artefact, and radial and sector caps for every fragment. Adjoining fragments are nudged apart by a small radial gap before export, because two coincident seam faces from neighbouring pieces would otherwise be counted from four faces instead of two. Wall thickness, pin diameter and clearance for the print-ready version are checked against EdiBrain's own FDM design rules: 0.8 millimetres minimum wall, 2 millimetres minimum hole diameter, 0.2 millimetres minimum clearance.
Frequently asked questions
Is a museum 3D scan of an ancient object automatically free to use?
No, and that is one of the most common misunderstandings the tool is built to correct. Copyright on the object itself may well have expired, an unnamed sculptor's work is normally in the public domain, but the scan or photograph of it is a separate creation that a museum can hold rights over regardless of the object's age. The tool shows the licence of the specific scan you are looking at, never an assumption that an old object automatically means a free file.
What is the difference between the Smithsonian's collection and the British Museum's?
Smithsonian Open Access declared CC0 for over 2,000 3D models and 2.8 million images in February 2020: no attribution, no non-commercial restriction, nothing required. The British Museum publishes through Sketchfab under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which requires attribution, forbids commercial use and forces any derivative to carry the same licence. Both are legitimate for classroom use; only the Smithsonian collection clears a commercial intent.
Can I print two artefacts from different collections together as one combined model?
Only if their licences allow it. Two CC BY-SA models combine cleanly because they carry the same share alike text. A CC BY-SA model cannot combine with a CC BY-NC-SA one, because the two share alike texts are not the same and the result cannot honestly carry both. Anything under a no derivatives licence cannot be combined with anything else at all; the tool treats that as an absolute block, not a warning.
What does the tool generate once I pick a model to use?
A correctly formatted attribution line following the TASL standard: Title, Author, Source, Licence, with a link to the licence text. For a CC0 model it says plainly that attribution is not legally required but remains good practice; for anything else it gives the exact wording the museum or the Creative Commons licence expects, ready to paste onto the base of the print or into the accompanying lesson document.
Why does the tool use two different half lives for radiocarbon dating?
Willard Libby published 5,568 years in 1949, and it became the historical international convention laboratories still use to calculate a conventional age. Cambridge's later measurement of 5,730 years is closer to the true physical value. Feeding the same measured activity through both constants gives two different calculated ages for the same sample, and that gap is itself the point, not an error in either constant.
Does the typology mode give me a confirmed date for my vessel?
No. It compares the height to maximum diameter and neck to maximum diameter ratios against published ranges, illustrated here with Roman amphora types from Peacock and Williams, 1986, and returns every range the proportions fall inside, never a single certain answer. Published typological boundaries overlap and are disputed between researchers, so more than one match at once is correct behaviour, not an error, and every entry is marked as needing verification against the primary source before it carries real weight.
Does the shrinkage calculation just add the drying and firing percentages together?
No, and that is a documented mistake the tool deliberately avoids. Drying shrinkage and firing shrinkage are applied one after the other, multiplicatively, because firing shrinkage acts on the size the clay has already reached after drying, not on the original size. Adding the two percentages directly understates the final shrinkage, and the gap grows larger the bigger the two percentages are.
Does every mode in the tool produce something I can 3D print?
No. The chord and sagitta rim reconstruction and the stratigraphic layer stack are diagrams, not solid bodies, so neither offers an STL or 3MF download; the tool says so directly on screen rather than showing a button that leads to an empty file. The pottery revolve, the flat artefact, the typology view, the scaled print-ready version and the broken fragments all export as closed, watertight geometry.
Other tools
Part of the EduFacturing tool set for manufacturing and 3D printing.
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