Documenting rock art within its wider landscape. An experience of 3D mapping in the Hualfin valley (Catamarca, Argentina)

PARCERO-OUBIÑA, CÉSAR; FÁBREGA-ALVAREZ, PASTOR; LYNCH, JULIETA

Barcelona

Congreso; 24th EAA Annual Meeting; 2018

European Association of Archaeologists, Universitat de Barcelona

The use of digital tools for the 3D documentation of archaeological sites and artifacts, rock art among them, has become extremely popular in archaeology in the last years. When compared to other archaeological features, rock art poses some additional challenges for 3D documentation, namely the need to combine different granularities in order to document both the details of the engravings and the general layout of the terrain around, assuming that we are interested in approaching rock art from a landscape perspective.In this paper we will present the process we followed for the 3D documentation of the site of Villavil 2, in the Andean valley of Hualfin (Catamarca, Argentina). This site that occupies a scenic location in the landscape, on top of a vertical cliff with difficult access that gives access to a dead-end gorge where different remains of ancient activity are visible on the ground. Different engravings exist on some rocks located near the edge of the cliff, dating from the Desarrollos Regionales (ca. 1000 -1430 AD) and Inca (1430-1532 AD) periods. A combination of low altitude aerial images taken from a UAV and ground photography allowed us to create a mosaic of different granularity of both the rock engravings and the whole area, that were processed to produce different 3D models, not without some difficulties.The paper will discuss the challenges, costs and benefits of the field documentation and the production of the 3D models, with a special emphasis on the possibilities and limitations for the use of the 3D datasets that we have produced. We will also present some preliminary results of the archaeological characterization of the site.