At the beginning of Sophomore year, I was recruited to be the Engineering Lead of an interdisciplinary research project for the Laboratory for Computational Anthropology and Anthroinformatics (LCA.) I was tasked with working directly with Erika Denker, the Research Project Lead, to create a new piece of lab equipment that was capable of accurately producing bone surface modifications (BSMs) consistent with those made by carnivores. To put it more simply, my goal was to make a device that could make animal bite marks on bones.

When an archeologist finds a bone, there are often many pockmarks and other deformations on its surface that can tell you a lot about the bone, the creature it came from, and how that creature lived and died. One way creatures live and die is by being hunted and/or eaten. This information about who is hunting/eating whom is very important to zooarchaeologists. The way they get this information, however, is a very long and arduous process. It can take years or even decades to identify a bite mark. Not to mention the fact that that bone will likely need to be shipped to several experts around the world for them to give their opinion, and even then it can be a 50-60% accuracy guess. The big hold-up lies in how these experts make these inferences. They compare the specimen to bone marks of known origin that have been produced under known and controlled experimental conditions. But these BSMs of known origin are hard to come by because their creation can be very cost-prohibitive, time-consuming, difficult to calibrate, dangerous, or just impossible in the case of extinct creatures. For example, the LCA does work identifying grey wolf bite marks, but over the last 7 years, they have only been able to acquire 35 BSMs of known origin for the grey wolf over several expensive outings. But what if you didn't need a living creature to create these BSMs of known origin? That was my goal.

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Enter JAWS. After countless hours of research, experimentation, and familiarizing myself with all the context and relevant knowledge surrounding this problem, I landed on pneumatics as the best way to replicate the forces involved. This worried Erika and the rest of the team as I had never worked with pneumatics before, but I was ecstatic! I love sinking my teeth into a new topic for something I'm working on! I got straight to work, watching lectures, reaching out to peers on campus, making posts on public forums, and before I knew it I was confident I could design a pneumatic system that would accomplish our needs. However, I also realized a system that could do even more could be accomplished with not much additional effort.

 

Up until this point, the goal was to design a system that could replicate grey wolf bite marks. I proposed that we expand our efforts to create a modular device that would allow us to position and control each piston to accommodate replicating any number of compatible (mainly limited by size) animal bites. I presented a design I had modeled in NX that utilized a t-slot aluminum extrusion frame and lockable slides to enable us to match the force distribution of larger and smaller creatures than the grey wolf. My ambition was met with the approval of the rest of the team so Erika and I went to work applying for grants and securing funding using the bill of materials I had developed.

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Once funding was secured, we purchased parts, and I completed the entire construction of the device in my dorm room. I started by assembling the pneumatic system and was beyond relieved to see my theoretical work verified if only to be thwarted temporarily by electronic/programming bugs. Then using the hand tools I had available, I constructed the gantry that would support the pneumatics and enclosed the system in shatter-resistant polycarbonate. Along the way, we realized we needed something to actually do the biting. So we purchased a museum-grade model of a grey wolf skull, contacted the foundry club on campus, and with their help created an aluminum sand casting of the mouth and jaw. There are better tooth-like materials that can and will be used with the device, but preliminarily aluminum was the most cost-effective option for initial testing. We secured the aluminum mouth to the base and pistons, eventually connecting the two with a custom hinge, and JAWS was complete!

 

During the construction phase, we presented our research project at both the Society for American Archaeology's 87th Annual Meeting in Chicago and the Spring 2022 Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference. (Poster available below. The pictures shown are in progress, I promise I made the electronics prettier.) We received a lot of interest from the Archaeological community in Chicago and won two awards at Purdue:
Second Place - College of Liberal Arts

Third Place - Interdisciplinary Presentation