The use of 3D printing in dental anthropology collections

Luca Fiorenza
August 21, 2018

Our manuscript on the use of 3D printing in dental anthropology collections has been recently published in teh American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and it is now available online on the following link: https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.23640

We compared the accuracy of different 3D printers to establish whether Rapid Prototyping (RP) technology can be used effectively to reproduce anthropological dental collections, and potentially replacing access to oftentimes fragile and irreplaceable original material.

The quality of current commercial 3D printers has reached a good level of accuracy and detail reproduction. However, the costs and printing times limit its application to produce large sample numbers for use in most anthropological studies, Nonetheless, RP offers a viable option to preserve numerically constraint fragile skeletal and dental material in palaeoanthropological collections.

Luca Fiorenza

Luca is Head of the Palaeodiet Research Lab and he received his Bachelor/Master degree in Natural Sciences in 2003 at La Sapienza University in Rome (Italy), and completed his PhD in Biological Sciences between the Goethe University and the Senckenberg Research Institute (Frankfurt, Germany) at the end of 2009. During his doctoral degree he was part of an outstanding multidisciplinary network called EVAN (European Virtual Anthropology Network), where he mastered cutting-edge techniques for the study of anatomical variability, including medical imaging, 3D digitisation, display, modelling and programming. Luca’s research interests mostly focus on functional morphology of the masticatory apparatus in human and non-human primates, and on the importance of the role of diet in human evolution.