New Media, Old Stories: Democratizing Archaeology with Open Source Methods in Virtual Heritage Management at Northern Rio Grande Pueblos

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Covering 50 square miles of tablelands in northern New Mexico, Mesa Prieta (Black Mesa, Mesa Canoa) is an exceptional petroglyph landscape with remarkable historical and cultural significance. As a core part of its mission, the nonprofit Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project’s (MP3) has long partnered with descendant communities, particularly Tewa Pueblos. A recent outgrowth of this partnership has been developing a virtual reality tours project that engages Pueblo youths and community elders in and throughout the creative process. Per community interests and considerations for sensitivity, the project’s scope currently focuses on telling stories of migration through immersive virtual reality experiences of related petroglyph iconography. The end-user experience benefits from MP3’s Summer Youth Intern Program (SYIP), which engages high school aged Indigenous and Hispano/a youths in a field school–like archaeological curriculum for college credit. In addition to survey and recording methods, the SYIP interns learn photographic and programming techniques to make photogrammetric models and spherical panorama settings. These depictions are integrated into a basic, web-based, open source virtual tours platform (Pannellum) with oral histories provided by community partners (Arthur Cruz, Ohkay Owingeh) and Indigenous-authored primary sources (Alfonso Ortiz and Tessie Naranjo) to create a lightweight, interactive, multicursal, virtual reality learning experience.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36835.0