Submerged Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Cave Sites on the Yucatan Peninsula: Recent Advances in Virtual Access and Visual Analytics

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Re-Visualizing Submerged Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The submerged cave systems of the eastern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, provide access to well preserved prehistoric deposits that reveal a wealth of information about the ecology of the region and its Paleoamerican inhabitants. Ongoing interdisciplinary research efforts aim to identify and reconstruct the processes that have formed and transformed these subterranean sites over millennia. In addition to ongoing studies involving evidence of human activity, human skeleton remains, and diverse assemblages of Pleistocene-Holocene fauna and botanical deposits, the development of digital workflows enable virtual access to remote sites. Rather than functioning as static 3D models, multimodal and multiresolution digital twins enable virtual taphonomic analyses across scales – allowing domain experts to annotate, segment, extract, measure, and compare, while taking advantage of the complementary surface or volumetric views afforded by each imaging modality. Additionally, native image files corresponding to point regions can be readily and simultaneously consulted as users virtually access the caves.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Re-Visualizing Submerged Landscapes   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow