Defining the Spatial Structure of Rock Art in 12th Unnamed Cave, Tennessee, through 3D Modeling and GIS

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Twelfth Unnamed Cave is a dark-zone cave art site in Tennessee that contains over 300 individual petroglyphs. Like many cave art sites in the American Southeast, the locations of the art within the cave appear to be structured. However, traditional spatial analytical methods have made it difficult to understand the distribution of artwork across the morphologically complex site. This study uses a 3D photogrammetric map of 12th Unnamed Cave to study the locations of petroglyphs from a new perspective. Various 3D GIS tools are utilized to measure the glyphs’ locations from prominent cave features, the volume of the chambers in which they are located, and their visibility from different vantage points. Results suggest that experience and perception played dominant roles in determining where certain motifs were prioritized, and that 3D modeling is a powerful tool for quantifying these phenomenological variables.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39319.0