This award provides support for a 3 day conference to be held at the Lower Pecos Texas rock art research center, SHUMLA. It brings together French researchers and US-based scientists to share new and emerging methods in the documentation, archiving, preservation, and interpretation of rock art.
Rock art refers to images made on rock walls, rock shelters, inside caves or architectural structures. It is found globally with concentrations in North America, Africa, Australia, Europe, China and many other locations where one finds rock surfaces. This marking on rock has been a part of the human cultural repertoire for at least 30,000 years and takes many forms, including engravings and use of pigments for paintings and drawings. In recent decades, research attention on rock art has been increasing with a correspondingly rapid development of multiple methods of photography, digital and GIS recording, and web-based documentation and archiving. Given the fragility of many images and rock art manifestations, and given the increasing attention to what one can infer about human cultural lives from rock art, this is an ideal moment to bring together some of the most active researchers who are developing sophisticated and innovative methods and techniques. This collaborative project will include researchers from both US and French based institutions to permit sharing of methods and approaches across several research traditions. The US and France are two world centers for rock art research and to date there has been relatively little interaction between them.
This conference will explicitly provide researchers with increased exposure to a multiplicity of scientific approaches and methods that can be taken back to a variety of scholarly and lay public communities in both France and the United States, as well as Australia. The conference itself is being held at a non-profit educational research center (SHUMLA) where the results of the meeting will be integrated into the newsletters and educational activities. These include K-12 events and audiences. The conference will be filmed by one of the participants who is also the Director of a for-the-public production company in France that presents archaeology to the lay public through films and other media. The participants at the conference include a broad range of researchers (e.g., half are women and one of the U.S. researchers is an active member of a Native American tribe) from a variety of institutions including a small liberal arts public college in the US, private research consultancy, the SHUMLA educational center, and from European museums. Materials from the conference, such as powerpoint presentations on new methods and their applications, will be made available to avocational as well as professional groups.
Over the course of 5 days, scientists from France and in US institutions gathered to stay in tents at the educational research Shumla Center in the south of Texas to exchange research ideas and products related to the amazing cultural heritage known world-wide as "rock art". This refers to paintings and engravings made on rock surfaces in many locations around the world beginning perhaps some 35-50, 000 years ago in some places. Today we are challenged to be able to document and preserve thousands of images made by many different cultural groups over millenia. Much focus was on different ways to date the images and how to harness the many new digital technologies to both document and preserve as well as to enhance interpretation. Thanks to able translators, communication was easy and with excellent slide and video presentations, the new research technologies and methods were exchanged in lively open discussions. In addition to the conference presentations, the group made several field trips to local rock art sites in the Lower Pecos River Valley, Texas with the Shumla researchers where some of the methods and interpretations could be experienced first hand. From these days of scholarly exchange have developed several new collaborative projects involving different sets of attendees. For example, a new method for using photogrammetry to document the images along a rock surface over many meters used in the US has now been used in one of the Ice Age painted caves in France. One of the French researchers is now studying the pigments from an excavation site in France being co-directed by one of the US participants. These 2 collaborators are now organizing an international conference in 2015 where the uses of chemistry for the study of art --both prehistoric and Renaissance-- will be discussed and they both particpated in an August 2014 AAAS Gordon Conference on scientific methods in cultural heritage.In this day and age of harnessing scientific methods and ever -expanding digital technologies, by bringing together researchers who might not otherwise read or know about each other's work and accomplishments can double the impact of research efforts; the "wheels of invention" will not have to be re-invented. The intellectual stimulation and energy of discussions about how to draw upon and use scientific methods to better understand such humanistic activities as the making of "art" and culturally-meaningful images have already moved the study, documentation and archiving of an irreplaceable cultural resource into new areas. The international collaboration, the sharing of cultural patrimonies of several countries, the equal participation of men and women, the involvement of students as assistants at the conference and the inclusion of a Native American scholar of rock art supported the fact that there are broader impacts of the conference that enhanced the intellectual merits.
