By Amber Bouman / Source: Engadget

molds

While 3D printing is often used for advancements in medicine or science, such as FDA-approved drugs or rocket pumps, this week it made an academic one. A PhD student at the Australian National University recently used a 3D printer to duplicate an Irish artifact previously known as the “Conical Spearbutt of Navan,” thought to be a tool and weapon. Billy Ó Foghlú’s replica was able to prove that the ancient spearbutt was, in fact, an ancient mouthpiece — likely to an iron-age horn.

While bronze-age and iron-age musical instruments, specifically horns, have been found throughout Europe and Scandinavia, the lack of mouthpieces had led historians to believe that Ireland went through a “musical dark age.” Ó Foghlú used the exact measurements of the artifact to produce a 3D copy which he then used with his own horn. He said it produced a “richer, more velvety tone,” and feels that the lack of recovered instruments in the area is due not to a supposed dark age, but because the instruments were “ritually dismantled and laid down as offerings when their owner died.”

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