Anglo-Saxon Bucket
By Nicholas Spezia-Shwiff
The object that I analyzed and digitally reconstructed was an Anglo-Saxon bucket found at the West Stow Village cemetery. This bucket was created sometime between 420 to 650 CE, during the period when West Stow was inhabited. This bucket is also rather small, around 22cm high by 20cm across the bottom, made out of wood, and banded horizontally by strips of copper-alloy. Based on the evidence available to us, the social status of the person who was buried with this bucket is unclear—since copper-alloy buckets from the early Anglo-Saxon period often reflected far more than just social status, such as ritual and symbolic beliefs of the afterlife, other objects from the grave would need to be analyzed as well. In terms of practical uses, Anglo-Saxon buckets served multiple functions, from being used in social settings like a feast, where it would have acted as either a communal serving vessel for the host to provide drinks or as a personal drinking cup (though the latter use is contested), to what we would associate buckets with today (transporting liquids, farming, etc.)
To reconstruct the West Stow bucket in a digital format, I used the program Agisoft Metashape. The program is photogrammetric, which basically means that it recreates a 3D model of an object through photos of said object. Agisoft Metashape had a fairly shallow learning curve, and after following a couple of tutorials found on YouTube, I was able to create a basic model of the bucket (Fig. 2). The problem was, and this is clear from the picture, that many parts of the bucket did not render in correctly. This was because of an issue where the darker parts of the bucket blended into the background of the photos. To fix this, I applied a mask through the program Photoshop, which resulted in a much better outcome (Fig. 3).
One insight I gained while making this digital reconstruction is that I felt less of a connection to the materials and object itself than I would have from doing a physical reconstruction. There were many times throughout the process where it did not feel like I was actually interacting with an object, but rather just looking at pixels on a screen. No matter what object I was digitally reconstructing, it would have been the same process of creation in the program, which is certainly not true of a physical model. It therefore would have probably made the experience more fulfilling to have made a physical reconstruction. In terms of accessibility, however, I found digital reconstruction to be much better. Instead of having to acquire wood and metal (or making the object out of another material which would not have been as authentic), I was able to work on the model from the convenience of anywhere I could use a computer.
