For the past year we have been busy building a virtual material culture collection, which will serve as the foundation for our new virtual teaching lab. Lab exercises will be built into existing archaeology courses (ANTH 272, 277, 320, 377, etc.) to allow students to gain a virtual "hands on" experience with artifacts, and learn through experience how archaeologists deal with material culture on a basic level in the laboratory. We are hoping to have some of these beginner lab exercises built into our existing courses by the end of 2017, and also hope to expand to include the other subdisciplines of anthropology in the near future.

Photo shows our two scanners hard at work producing 3D images of artifacts from Central and South America