Dynamic Collections: An Interactive Platform for 3D Archaeological Artefacts

Dynamic Collections is an initiative led by the Digital Archaeology Laboratory (DARKLab) at Lund University, in collaboration with the Visual Computing Lab at the National Research Council of Italy's Institute for Information Science and Technologies "Alessandro Faedo" (ISTI-CNR).

The platform is generously supported by Swedigarch – the Swedish National Infrastructure for Digital Archaeology, the Einar Hansen Foundation, and the Thora Ohlsson Foundation. Dynamic Collections is not a long-term data repository. It is an interactive environment designed to engage with 3D archaeological artefacts, enabling researchers, students, and heritage professionals to explore, annotate, and share digital objects. Users can build thematic collections, exchange annotations, and collaboratively extract information from 3D materials to support research and education.

Project Participants

Nicolò Dell'Unto, Lund University
Fredrik Ekengren, Lund University
Marco Callieri, CNR – National Research Council of Italy
Paola Derudas, Lund University
Danilo Marco Campanaro, Lund University
Giuseppe Naponiello, Lund University
Åsa Berggren, Lund University

Project Coordination

Nicolò Dell'Unto (PI)
Fredrik Ekengren (Co-PI)
Marco Callieri (Co-PI)

System Development

Marco Callieri, Giuseppe Naponiello
Database: Marco Callieri, Giuseppe Naponiello

Mapping:Giuseppe Naponiello, Paola Derudas

Data Acquisition and Post-Processing

Danilo Marco Campanaro

Web Contents

Marco Callieri, Danilo Marco Campanaro

Project Partners

Lund University Digital Archaeology Laboratory – DARKLab
Visual Computing Lab, National Research Council of Italy, Institute for Information Science and Technologies "Alessandro Faedo" – ISTI-CNR
Lund University Historical Museum
Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Lund University
The Swedish History Museum

Special thanks go to our student interns Jake Clarke, Samantha Day, Michael Harris, Filip Johnstone, Margaret Muth, Hanna Rosenborg, Nell Esbjörnsson, Yunchen Tan, and Andra Tudor for their excellent work and support during the project years 2019–2023, and to Rebecca Ringdahl and Elna Arvidsson for their contributions to Dynamic Collections during 2024/2025.

Platform availability and licensing

Dynamic Collections Plus — the current platform — is openly available. The source code is published on GitHub, and each release is archived on Zenodo for long-term access and citation, under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later):
👉 Source code: github.com/LundDarkLab/adc
👉 Archived release (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20669650

The bundled 3DHOP viewer is © Visual Computing Lab, ISTI-CNR, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later).

The legacy Dynamic Collections platform, developed together with the Visual Computing Lab (ISTI-CNR), remains available under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0):
👉 github.com/cnr-isti-vclab/DynamicCollections

Data, licensing, and reuse

Dynamic Collections is not a long-term data repository. It provides access to records created and published by the contributing institutions. Each record may carry its own copyright and licensing conditions, set by the institution that produced it, and the applicable terms are always shown on the corresponding artefact page within Dynamic Collections.

Each record brings together three types of information, which may be licensed differently:

• Metadata on the original artefact — descriptive information about the physical object that was digitised (for example, material and provenance).
• Paradata on the virtual artefact — technical and contextual information about the 3D model itself (for example, method, equipment, and processing).
• The 3D visualisation — the interactive model shown through the Dynamic Collections viewer (3DHOP).

The 3D visualisation cannot be downloaded directly from Dynamic Collections, although users may capture screenshots with the built-in tools. Where an institution has deposited the underlying 3D model under a DOI, Dynamic Collections links directly to it, and the model can then be accessed and downloaded from the external repository chosen by that institution (for example, Zenodo or SND). The availability, format, and licence of any downloadable data therefore depend entirely on the publishing institution.

Many records are released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence and can be reused with attribution, but the version of CC BY varies between records, so the licence stated on each artefact page always takes precedence. For a summary of the most common versions, see CC BY 4.0, CC BY 3.0, and CC BY 2.0.

Crediting Dynamic Collections

If you reproduce material generated from the platform — a screenshot, for example — please credit it as:

"Image produced using the Dynamic Collections platform, artefact [object name or inventory number], available at [artefact URL], DARKLab, Lund University."

If you use, reference, or build on the platform itself in research, teaching, or further development, please cite its archived release on Zenodo:

Naponiello, G., Marco, C., Dell'Unto, N., & Lund University Digital Archaeology Lab-DARKLab. (2026). Dynamic Collections Plus (v1.0.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20669651

These credits help maintain the visibility and traceability of the data and support the open-access aims of the project.