Ricerc@Sapienza

Objective: Concha bullosa is a rather common condition of the nasal turbinates, rarely reported in archaeological skeletal collections. This paper examines a case of concha bullosa as seen in a female cranium from a burial in central Italy, dated to the Longobard domination in the Peninsula (mid-7th– early 8th century CE). Materials: The individual under investigation (T86/17) comes from the funerary area of Selvicciola, located near the town of Viterbo in northern Latium, Italy. Methods: The skeleton was macroscopically examined.

Several digital technologies are nowadays developed and applied to the study of the human fossil record. Here, we present a low-cost hardware implementation of the digital acquisition via photogrammetry, applied to a specimen of paleoanthropological interest: the Neanderthal skull Saccopastore 1. Such implementation has the purpose to semi-automatize the procedures of digital acquisition, by

Objectives: We present two new automatic tools, developed under the R environment, to repro-
duce the internal and external structures of bony elements. The first method, Computer-Aided
Laser Scanner Emulator (CA-LSE), provides the reconstruction of the external portions of a 3D
mesh by simulating the action of a laser scanner. The second method, Automatic Segmentation
Tool for 3D objects (AST-3D), performs the digital reconstruction of anatomical cavities.
Materials and methods: We present the application of CA-LSE and AST-3D methods to different

Objectives: Reproducing cranial endocasts is a major goal of researchers interested in vertebrate brain evolution. We present a new R software, named endomaker, which allows the automatic extraction of endocasts from skull meshes along with the calculation of its volume. Materials and methods: We applied endomaker on non-primate and primate skulls including the Australopithecus africanus specimen Sts-5. Results: We proved endomaker is faster, more feature-rich and possibly more accurate than competing software.