Old World Artifacts Meet New World Technology On The Chess Board

Over the past few years, the Virtual Curation Laboratory team at Virginia Commonwealth University has been to more than 25 archeological and historical sites in search of artifacts to scan. The chess sets began as a way to pass the time during long scanning sessions, but are proving to be an excellent way of engaging the public, students and others interested in archaeology and the lab's 3-D scanning technology.

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The lab was launched in 2011 as part of the Department of Defense's Legacy Resource Management Program, which aims to preserve the United States' natural and culture heritage, including through archeological investigations. The lab's mission is to use its NextEngine 3-D scanner to digitally scan artifacts and animal bones, creating a virtual catalog of historical objects and allowing them to be replicated via a 3-D printer.

One of the three chess sets features a variety of miscellaneous artifacts from multiple historical sites like George Washington's boyhood home at Ferry Farm, Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest and James Madison's home Montpelier.

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The pawn in the miscellaneous set is a 3-D-printed replica of a "Frozen Charlotte" doll figurine dating back to the 1850s-1920 and found in Washington, D.C. Frozen Charlotte dolls were a type of china doll based on the American folk ballad "Fair Charlotte," which tells the story of a girl who refuses to wear a winter coat because it would cover up her dress, and then she freezes to death.

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A deer toe bone lent to the lab for 3-D scanning serves as the rook.

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A World War I doughboy figurine from Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest is the set's knight.

"That's one of those artifacts when we went there and said, 'What can we scan that's cool?' We thought it'd be something Thomas Jefferson-related, but they gave us this figurine that someone played with in the early 20th century." - Bernard Means, Ph.D., director of VCU's Virtual Curation Laboratory

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Headless male and female figures from the 18th century that were discovered at Mount Vernon are the set's king and queen.

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A projectile point from the Early Woodland era – circa 1,000 B.C. to 100 A.D. – that was discovered at George Washington's boyhood home at Ferry Farm is the set's bishop.

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In one of the chess sets, each piece is a 3-D plastic replica of artifacts from 1607 to 1610 found at a dig at the Jamestown Settlement.

The pawn of the Jamestown set is a scaled-down model of a bust based on the skull of a 14- or 15-year-old boy killed by an arrow in 1607. The bust was recently on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

"He was killed by an arrow from an American Indian, so they call him ‘Arrow Point Boy,’" Means said. "We scanned him and made him our pawn."

The Jamestown set's king is a "Bartmann" jug fragment, or German stoneware depicting a "Bartmann," which means "wild man." "They're bearded figurines," Means said. "Some of them are really stern. They have a lot of them at Jamestown."

The queen is a jeweler's mold of an embossed pelican standing on a pedestal.

"[The Jamestown settlement] brought a jeweler over very early on, but then he disappears from the historical record," Means said

The Jamestown set's knight is a 3-D model of a butchered dog mandible. The jawbone has cut marks indicating that settlers likely ate the dog, and the bone dates to the Jamestown settlement's "starving time" in the winter of 1609-10.

The rook, similarly, is a butchered horse tibia recovered at Jamestown.

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Another chess set features projectile points – such as arrowheads and spear points – found in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia and dating as far back as 11,500 B.C.

The team is planning to create more chess sets, as well as possibly branch out into other board games such as backgammon, checkers or clue.