Centuries later, UMD recreating peace coins for tribal descendants in Maryland

While rummaging through the Maryland Center for History and Culture in Baltimore, Mario Harley, a citizen and historian of the Piscataway tribe, found peace coins given out by British colonists settling in the state. These were pieces of history that had been forgotten -- one coin dating back to 1652.

They were given to tribal leaders as symbols of peace treaties, typically agreements about land and trade. Over time, though, they would repeatedly be broken if the tribes had any actual claim to the land involved.

This week, engineering students at the University of Maryland have been using a 3D printer to recreate those coins. The process takes 10-12 hours inside the printer, and a few more hours to put on finishing touches.

"We have a powder-based 3D metal printer," said Rick Blanton, the director of technical operations for the Clark School of Engineering at the university. "What this is able to do is take layers of powdered metal and then use a laser to heat that powder up until it melts together in a sintering process."

It's repeated hundreds to thousands of times, based on a 3D scan done by an Owings Mills-based company called Direct Dimensions. The technology that private company used can read details and narrow down precision to 50 micron.

To put that in context, a human hair has a diameter of 75 micron. The technology is so precise, it's able to capture the imprecision that comes with handmade coins from centuries ago.

"One of the nice things about the technology is that you're able to catch some of the original surface textures that were part of the original coins," Blanton said.

From what Harley has seen so far, the level of detail found in the new coins is even greater than what was washed away by centuries of time.

"Especially the portrait of Anne Arundel, which is on the reverse side of the 1652 Calvert medal," Harley said. "The details in her hair and the in the air, clothing, her facial expressions, was greater than what it was on the historic metal."

The three coins being reproduced are the Calver Peace Medal, which was given to the Susquehannock tribe in 1652 in exchange for rights to Piscataway lands along the Chesapeake Bay -- a deal that would be sort of like if New Jersey just decided to sell the state of Delaware to Maryland.

"This was the first peace medal given to indigenous America by the British," Harley said.

Another medal was given to the Piscataway by the Calverts in 1676 as a token of good faith. The last one has six arrows, which has historians thinking it was made in the 1740s and represented the Iroquois Confederacy of Six Nations.

The three medals are being recreated to be bigger than the originals, so living members of the tribes can receive them and carry them.

The work is being done by engineering students such as Robert Alban. For him, it's about learning skills that will help him when he graduates.

"It poses an interesting challenge to me as an operator and as a manager of this machine, of 'How do you make that work?' Because there are a lot of companies, like Lockheed Martin, a lot of other aerospace contractors that use these same machines," Alban said. "They just rip parts from them and use them in whatever build they're doing at the time. So it's really fun to get challenging pieces like this that I know will definitely help me in my future."

Blanton said the real world impact of this classroom learning comes with higher stakes than a typical classroom project, with a higher level of expectation and stricter definition of success.

"It allows for the living members of the tribe today to have representative artifacts that are absolutely critical to their culture," he said. "Having that history available for them to, you know, see, touch and feel is a critical component to making that connection with their past."

Harley is hoping to get the recreated coins next week.

"I can only imagine putting myself in the place of my ancestors," he said. "When they're coming back with these medals in their hand, they're feeling quite proud that they maybe, maybe have established a relationship that could be long lasting, that allowed them to continue to live the lifestyle the creator intended them to live. And then realizing over time that that wasn't the case."

He was extremely thankful to the university, as well as Direct Dimension, for collaborating to make this possible.

"Having something on display in the museum is good, but having the people in the community, in the DMV region be aware of it, is even better," he said. "Having a capability at College Park to reproduce items is good. Having something of a historical nature that we can share with the students on campus as well as around the region, is better."

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