A Methodology for the Visualization of 3D Petroglyph Data

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research and Analysis Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Rock markings have long captivated the public imagination. More recently, the archaeological field has witnessed a renaissance in rock-marking scholarship as researchers recognize both the continued importance of these features to descendant communities and their potential to inform our understandings of antiquity. Yet, attempts to engage with this content are complicated by the immense challenge in delineating the boundaries and details of petroglyphs. The subjective methods used to record and present these features often result in disparate representations of the same sites, and from their widely divergent starting points scholars have unsurprisingly arrived at antipodal interpretations. While highly accurate, three-dimensional recording techniques are increasingly applied to the documentation of rock markings, we still lack a comprehensive and objective methodology for utilizing the data they produce. This study presents new techniques for leveraging the data potential of 3D petroglyph scans in the creation of objective visualizations of rock markings. It outlines and demonstrates a process of uniform manipulations performed in CloudCompare, a free 3D modeling software, for the purpose of achieving improved visual contrast of petroglyphs. The methodology presented has the capacity to make previously unidentified markings visible and may prove applicable to other archaeological problems, such as reading eroded gravestones.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research and Analysis Part II

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52051