Virtual images of an earring from the 1600s or 1700s and a 7,000-year-old projectile point are among the exhibits in a show opening at the Palace of the Governors later this month.

The state Conservation Lab recently used a laser scanner from a Los Alamos firm to make the three-dimensional images of the items.

"This way, these (small artifacts) can be made larger and they can be rotated so people can see them" on a computer screen, said Mark MacKenzie, director of conservation and chief conservator for the eight-person lab located in the basement of the Museum of International Folk Art.

MacKenzie said the earring with gold bangles from the early Spanish colonial era is from a collection at El Rancho de las Golondrinas, southwest of Santa Fe.

The basalt dart point from the earliest hunter-gatherers was found "within, underneath or in very close proximity to the Palace of the Governors or the new history museum," he said.

New Mexico Virtualization LLC of Los Alamos brought in the 3-D imaging scanner for one day last month to photograph the objects as they rotate on a platform, bombarding them with millions of laser-beam bursts. MacKenzie said he did not know what the state paid the firm.

The dart point was mounted on a piece of Ethafoam — a material similar to Styrofoam, but chemically neutral so that it does not interfere with the object being scanned.

Since the earring's bangles moved, a conservation-safe resin called B-72 was used to immobilize the bangles while the earring was being scanned.

The exhibit, "Santa Fe Found: Fragments of Time," which opens Nov. 20 includes more than 160 artifacts — maps, documents, household goods, weapons and religious objects focusing on Santa Fe's Spanish colonists and their encounters with Native Americans. It will continue into 2010.

Many of the objects were among the 90,000 items recovered in 2003 and 2004 during the excavations prior to construction of the New Mexico History Museum, which opened in May at 113 Lincoln Ave., just behind Palace of the Governors.

Other objects come from the Baca-Garvisu site, the home of a prominent family in the 1700s, now the site of the Santa Fe Community Convention Center; El Rancho de las Golondrinas near La Cienega, and New Mexico's first Spanish capital at San Gabriel del Yunque, near Ohkay Owingeh.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.