3D Digital Rock Art Documentation and Preservation Workshop (2009-05)

Summary

RTI Viewer software (Mac OSX Version)

Cultural Heritage Imaging (c-h-i.org) developed a comprehensive training program for 3D digital rock art documentation and preservation, based on state-of-the-art computational photography techniques that are emerging as the next generation of cultural heritage tools for use both in the field and in museums.

Over the past several years, an international consortium of archaeologists, museum conservators and computer scientists have worked to develop a suite of capture, processing and semantic provenance tracking technologies. The most mature tool in this suite, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), has proven to be of tremendous value for creating digital surrogates of cultural heritage objects of remarkable quality. Used alone or in combination with stereo photogrammetry, RTI is extremely effective in the documentation and analysis of rock art.

Cuneiform artifact

This project brought key experts in these field domains together to produce a self-contained program that puts these techniques in the hands of archaeology and conservation professionals, non-technical Native American audiences, and the interested public.

This project developed a comprehensive program in onsite and online training of cost-effective, easy-to-use tools to digitally capture empirical data from rock art and petroglyph sites nationally. This raw data is designed to yield ‘born-archival,’ 3-dimensional (3D), digital representations that disclose, through transparent and precise mathematical enhancement, features unseen for thousands of years, without the need of specialists or specialized equipment.

The hands-on workshop was held at  the Presidio of San Francisco from July 23-24, 2009, and provided training materials, including do-it-yourself (DIY) guides and videos.

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