Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RECONSTRUCT (Reconstructing fragmented bones, reconstructing fragmented lives)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-06-01 bis 2025-05-31
Human skeletal remains can offer key information on diverse aspects of past life but, like all archaeological materials, they only give a glimpse into the life of past individuals; hence, a fragmented perspective into our ancestors’ lives. Their interpretative potential is greatly inhibited by the fact that such remains are often found fragmented due to several anthropogenic and natural taphonomic agents, such as funerary treatment, animal activity, soil pressure and others. This fragmentation severely limits the information that may be extracted from human bones in terms of metric analysis, geometry and morphology. RECONSTRUCT aimed at producing 3D morphable models for the main elements of the lower and upper limbs of the human skeleton, which would be then used to infer the missing morphology of fragmented or incomplete bones. In order to achieve this aim and address a major current limitation in human skeletal analysis, RECONSTRUCT integrated approaches from osteoarchaeology, forensic anthropology, biology, engineering, and data science. The results of the project can indeed maximize the information that may be extracted from bioarchaeological research, contributing to a more comprehensive assessment of past life parameters. RECONSTRUCT also has major implications in forensic anthropology since the study of modern skeletal remains suffers from similar limitations in terms of partial preservation as those witnessed in archaeological bones. Finally, the source code and raw data emanating from RECONSTRUCT have been made open access, making the approach easily transferable to zooarchaeology, palaeoanthropology, and other fields.
The RECONSTRUCT project had two major work paths. One related to the 3D digitization (digital twinning) of a large assemblage of skeletal elements of human long bones from several European collections, representing biological variation from the Eastern and Western parts of the continent. The other focused on the development of a number of methodologies for statistically modelling the morphological variation of human long bones and biologically profiling human remains. The digital twinning of the skeletal material resulted to 3618 digital twins of skeletal elements of the lower and upper limbs of 518 adult individuals, making it the largest to-date digital collection of human long bones. The digital twins have been openly shared with the curators of the respective collections, so that they are actively used by the universities housing these collections, but also by external scholars, for further research. Given the high accuracy of these models, they can effectively replace the direct handling of the skeletal collections for macroscopic analyses, thus, they can contribute to more ethical anthropological research practices. The second part of the RECONSTRUCT project involved the statistical analysis of the collection of skeletal digital twins in order to construct a statistical model of the morphology of the human long bones, which can facilitate both biological profiling of skeletal elements and surface reconstruction, with the former being a necessary step for the latter. A major achievement of the RECONSTRUCT project has been the development of the 3D Morphable Models for the long bones. Furthermore, novel automated methods have been developed, one for estimating skeletal sex and another for pair-matching, which are also supported by well-documented production-ready software to facilitate their application into the workflows of archaeologists and forensic anthropologists. The development of these skeletal methods and their accompanying software implementations required a large amount of supporting software, some of which had to be implemented from the ground up. Thus, substantial progress was made in developing helper libraries for the GNU Octave programming language, with the most prominent being the datatypes and the statistics packages. Finally, the groundwork for full surface reconstruction has been established since the 3D Bone Morphable Models have already been created and the software implementing the newly developed methods for biological profiling and skeletal sorting has already been developed and tested.
The research outputs of RECONSTRUCT significantly advance the current state of the art and open new avenues across multiple disciplines. The potential impact of the research outputs of the RECONSTRUCT project is significant and not necessarily limited to the field of forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology. The digital skeletal collection and 3D Bone Morphable Models are anticipated to accelerate future research on the field of virtual osteology, while the streamlined method supporting the creation of the 3D bone morphable models may well serve other disciplines studying the morphological variation of other species. The novel methods for biological profiling and skeletal individualization advance the state-of-the-art in the field by increasing their accuracy and performance, but they also introduce new concepts of machine learning and statistical modeling, which can be reapplied on diverse data and scenarios. The broadest potential impact in terms of scientific and educational usage might arise from the work done in the auxiliary GNU Octave packages (libraries). These were developed to support the research objectives of the RECONSTRUCT project, but given their general use, they will almost certainly meet broader utilization by researchers, students, and other professionals, as attested by the several hundreds of monthly downloads they already have. Looking ahead, the RECONSTRUCT outputs lay the foundation for sustainable digital anthropological research, with strong potential for integration into cross-disciplinary collaborations, educational frameworks, and future advances in automated skeletal reconstruction.