How to Capture a Photograph worth a Thousand words: Photographic Documentation of Rock Art in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas

Summary

Digital photography provides increasingly sophisticated applications that are invaluable to rock art researchers. Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center relies heavily on many of these applications to document, preserve, and analyze rock art—such as 3D modeling through Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry, multi-focal stacking, color management, and digital field microscopy for stratigraphic analyses. Depending on which applications are used, there are important considerations that should be addressed to ensure the collection and management of accurate visual data. This presentation will discuss some of these applications and how they are being implemented in the extensive photographic documentation of one of the most complex and threatened rock art sites in North America—the pictographic mural of Rattlesnake Canyon.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Rock Art: Methodology and Interpretation in the Archaeology of the Site

Keywords

Spatial Coverage