Bringing Home Rouffignac Cave Art

Rouffignac Mammoth (copper etching)

On our trip to France, we visited Rouffignac Cave to see the 13,000 year old cave paintings.  This was the first time I'd been in a cave or seen Palaeolithic art with my own eyes.  It was an incredible experience.  We had a few upper palaeolithic sites on our agenda and we thought we might get "caved-out" at some point and want to move on to something else.  I don't think that can happen.  Once you see one cave, you want to see them all.

Me and my Rouffignac Mammoth

The paintings and etchings in Rouffignac are known especially for their depictions of mammoths.  According to the visitor's guide to the cave; of the 254 works in the cave, 157 (or 61.8%) of them are of mammoths.  I was especially interested in seeing them, because I used one of the mammoths from Rouffignac as the model for a tattoo of a mammoth that I have inside my right arm. Its part of a band of cave art that goes around my arm, and includes a wooly rhino from Rouffignac as well.

Copper etching of the Three Rhinoceros Frieze, Rouffignac. Atelier Tara.

Print Shopping in the gift shop

Photos aren't allowed inside the deepest part of the cave, where the paintings are located, but the gift shop and information desk are located inside the mouth of the cave and photos are allowed there.  I don't have any shots of the actual paintings,but you can see some images on the official website.  The depictions of Rouffignac art illustrating this blog are from prints that we purchased in the gift shop.

Glass mammoth skull and tusks by Jean-Paul Raymond

Glass axe, even the lashings are glass

While we were visiting, there was an exhibition of blown glass objects by Jean-Paul Raymond called Fragments de Temps inside the cave.  The glass was worked into horns, wood, bones, and stone objects from the Upper Palaeolithic. Visitors pass Raymond's intricate and accurate reproductions as they walk deeper into the cave.

Glass spear head in foreshaft.  Notice the flint nodules poking through the chalky walls around it.

Everything is hollow glass

Weeeee!

The deepest paintings in the cave that are accessible to the public are a kilometre from the entrance, so the tours are done by train.  Much of the trip is in the pitch black darkness of the cave.  The tour guide has a small flashlight and will turn on lamps at specific stops along the way.  The art is either etched into the wall or painted on in black manganese.  Some of the wall surfaces are so soft, that the etchings were done by fingertip, perhaps even by children. We saw the caves with a trainload of kids - perhaps that's the way they were always meant to be visited.

The Ten Mammoth Frieze.  The original painting, inside Rouffignac, is 29 feet long and each mammoth is about 3 feet long.  The colours shown in the copper etching are also seen in the cave.  A band of white calcite has formed over the lower half of the wall, covering and obscuring the legs of the two groups of mammoths, meeting face to face in the middle.  The band of calcite, is one of the clues that helped establish the authenticity of the cave - it obviously formed slowly, over time after the paintings were put on the walls.  Copper Etching from Atelier Tara.

Approaching the train

The cave itself is a long narrow tunnel formed by water action over the past 70 million years.  In parts of the cave the floor has been dug out to accommodate the train tracks, but for the most part the passages are very uniform.  You can see the walls on either side and it feels like you are travelling down a long dark tunnel with chalk and flint walls.  Descending into the cave there are cave bear claw marks on the walls and several hundred metres of bear lairs; hundreds of giant nests scratched and wallowed into the clay floor.  Many of the paintings are located on the far side of these bear lairs.  The painters (and their kids!?) would have had to crawl through these still warm bear beds on their knees and bellies to reach the galleries in the deepest reaches of the caves.

This is a section of the Great Ceiling, located a kilometre deep in the cave.  The painters would have lain on their backs and painted the ceiling above them by lamp light.  (Copper Etching from Atelier Tara)

Cave Art Prints, Rouffignac and Pech Merle

On the way out we stopped in the gift shop and loaded up with books, photos, and craft documenting the cave, including the copper etchings that have illustrated this post.  The four prints came from the Atelier Tara, a workshop in southern France.  Having just gone through the cave, we were impressed by how accurately the prints captured the 13,000 year old artwork and now that they are framed and hanging in our stairwell, it feels like we have a little bit of Rouffignac here with us.

Photo Credits:
1, 3-8, 10-13: Tim Rast
2: Lori White
9: Rouffignac Interpreter (Sorry, I didn't get your name, but you did an awesome job! Thanks.)

Today We Remember...

  

  

Photo Credits:Tim Rast
St. John's Waterfront and War Memorial 11/11/11

iDraw Archaeological Features on the iPad

Tracing Rocks in iDraw

On screen digitizing took a turn for the fun this past week when I started using the iDraw app on my iPad to trace feature maps for the report I'm working on.  After more than two weeks of point and click tracing in Adobe Illustrator with the mouse, the switch to the stylus and iDraw seemed like a vacation.  I feel like a kid who gets to do all my homework for the next week on an etch-a-sketch. Fun!

The green insert shows the scanned paper map

iDraw is excellent for tracing drawings or maps which can be scanned as a single .jpg.  Many of the feature maps that I used Adobe Illustrator for were stitched together from many small overlapping maps.  Some of the rocks that I was tracing were represented on more than one hand drawn map and I wanted to be able to flip between all those different source layers as I made the final digital version.  You can't do that on iDraw, yet.  As far as I'm aware, you can only have a single .jpg as your base layer.  That limits the number of maps I can digitize this way, but for the ones that do fit into this category, the program works great.

A photo of the feature, iDraw profile, source .jpg

iDraw is a vector drawing program, comparable to a streamlined Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw.  You work in layers and all the information that you create in the app can be imported into programs like Adobe Illustrator as .pdf or .svg files.  There's a bit of a hiccup in opening the files in Illustrator on a PC, but once you know to expect it, its not that much of a hardship:  The individual layers from iDraw have all disappeared and all the information from each layer is grouped together into one layer.  At first it looks like you've lost all the layer info, but that's not really the case.  All the objects from each layer are locked together into separate groups, so you can select the contents of each iDraw layer with a single mouse click and copy them into a new Illustrator layer.  My maps are fairly simple at this point, with only 3-6 layers, so it only takes a few seconds to select each group of objects and paste them all onto their own layers again.  I'm not sure if this happens when opening iDraw files on a Mac.

This took less than an hour to trace

My first impression of using the iPad as a digitizing tablet is that its not as blisteringly fast as I was anticipating.  Drawing is faster, but only slightly quicker than using the mouse.  However, its so much more intuitive and comfortable to use than I was expecting, that at the end of the day, I have more maps done than I thought.  I don't dread starting the really big complex maps, because I know I won't be trapped in a chair at a desk all day.  My earliest experience with digitizing maps was using a puck on a big drafting table in a university computer lab.  With the iPad, you could do the same thing in a park or a big comfy chair.  Its a more enjoyable experience, so I take fewer breaks, so I get more work done in less time.

Stylus improves accuracy

I think one of the reasons that the actual digitizing is a little slower than I expected is that I haven't figured out how to turn off the auto rounding on the continuous draw Pencil.  I can't just trace around the rocks in one swipe, because the line doesn't want to close itself into a continuous polygon and iDraw smooths out the curves into an artistic flourish.  To accurately trace the rocks you need to tap, tap, tap with the Pen and connect the dots.  Its not hard, its just slightly slower.  Although I do like the Pencil's artistic flourishes for going back and quickly adding surface details to the rocks to give the illusion of a 3D object, rather than just a hollow polygon.  Its very easy to zoom in and out of the drawing for more detail on tricky places, but its still a good idea to use a stylus to help with your accuracy.

I find moving file with Dropbox simplest

I want to integrate the maps done on the iPad with the other maps that I did in Adobe Illustrator, so I'm not finishing the maps in iDraw.  When I get all the information traced off the base map I save it to my Dropbox folder and by the time I walk over to my laptop, its there waiting for me.  I'll do my final tweaking, scaling and labelling in AI.  Even with transferring files between platforms and programs, its still faster and more enjoyable to do as much of the grunt work on the iPad as possible.  For next season's work, I'll be thinking of ways to make more field drawings suitable for digitizing on the iPad.

Photo Credit:
1,5: Lori White
2-4,6: Tim Rast

Nikon Coolpix P500 Review

I've always got the P500 handy

I bought the Nikon Coolpix P500 camera last May because of its 36x optical zoom.  I've used it for work and travel over the past six months and am happy with it.  Most of the summer and fall photos on this blog have been taken with the P500.   Its basically an upgraded version of Nikon's P100 (read my P100 Review here), with an improved zoom and a bit of a jump from 10.3 to 12.1 megapixels.

Nikon Coolpix P500 

The 36x zoom is great.  Its a noticeable improvement over the 26x optical zoom on the P100. There are a few other changes, additions, and improvements from the P100, but most of these are pretty minor.  Its also available in black and red.  I bought the red one, because marketing works on me.

I like seeing individual feathers

I was happy with my Nikon P100, but the big boost in the zoom was too tempting to pass up.  I like taking wildlife shots and filling the whole frame with the animal makes me happy.  The 36x zoom is great for getting these types of shots, but requires a tripod in order to be practical.  With so much zoom, the field of view is very tiny and its easy to lose track of your subject.  Small movements at 36x zoom also translate into big motion blur.

I was 250m away for this shot

I primarily use the camera for web ready images, although for work, I do need photos that can be printed at a good quality resolution.  I find that the 12.1 megapixels on the P500 gives sharp enough images that I can do a lot of cropping and framing on my computer and still end up with a good crisp image.  At least, compared to other point and shoot cameras that I've used. All three of these surfing photos were taken from the same spot.  I can't recall if I was using full 36x magnification on the close-up shots, but it was probably pretty close.

This photo was cropped a bit, but I wasn't using the zoom.

This photo and the one above were taken from the same place on the boardwalk.  For this photo, I used a lot of zoom, cropped the image to frame it and the end result looks crisp enough for online viewing.

I used the Dusk/Dawn setting for this shot

All of the things that I liked about the P100 were carried over into the P500, including the HD video, panorama assist, autofocus, and flip viewfinder.   I've been using the dusk/dawn setting a lot more on the P500 than I did on the P100.  The HD video is still a favourite of mine.  For some reason they've reversed  the switch position of the Standard Definition video and High Definition video compared to the P100, which made me lose a few HD moments when I first got the camera.

Here's an example of video from the Aquarium in San Sebastien, Spain. It looks like Blogger processed some of the definition out of it, but its still pretty vibrant.

Dead batteries at remote sites suck

There were some recharging problems with the P500s when they first shipped.  The batteries wouldn't charge properly and died quickly, but a software upgrade a few weeks after they were released cleared up that problem.  I had to download and install the upgrade manually, but newer versions of the camera should be shipping with the updated operating system.  Luckily, the P100 and and P500 use the same batteries, so I always have lots of back-ups.  If I'm shooting occasionally, like in the field, I can go several days at a time before the battery dies, but on vacation days where I'm taking hundreds of photos a day or lots of videos, I'll need to swap in a fresh battery before the day is through.

One of the new settings that I've made frequent use of is the Easy Panorama feature.  You just point the camera and turn through 180 or 360 degrees and the camera takes a continuous panorama around you.  Its quick and fast.  If you want a higher resolution photo, the Panorama Assist option is still there to help you take pictures in sequence that can be stitched together later.

The harbour at San Sebastien, shot using Easy Panorama

Baby Snowy Owl

Despite the shape of the camera, this is still a point and shoot and not an SLR.  I like the versatility of the point and shoot and appreciate not having to carry around a lot of extra lenses and filters to get the shots I want.  But I do feel that the P500 is about as much as I want to invest in a point and shoot.  Many of the features that I like using the most, like the powerful zoom and the low light settings, require a tripod, so I'm already committed to carrying around extra equipment.  If I decide to upgrade again, I think I'll switch up to an SLR.   It means carrying more stuff, but I'm already doing that to take the sorts of photos that I want to take with the P500.

It works on small stuff, too.

Is this a good review or a bad review for the camera?  I like the P500 and I'd recommend it, but maybe I'm feeling like I'm outgrowing point and shoot cameras.  But that's not a knock against the P500 - its fun to use and I like the pictures it takes.  I thought the P100 was an excellent camera and this one is marginally better, so I guess that I think that the Nikon Coolpix P500 is marginally better than excellent.

Photo Credits:
1: Lori White
2-10, video: Tim Rast

Dolmens!

La Chabola de la Hechicera, Spain

At some point during the Neolithic, people across Europe thought it would  be a good idea to build massive stone burial features that are referred to as dolmens or portal tombs by archaeologists today.  When people talk about megalithic sites, they are talking about places like Stone Henge and dolmen, like these Spanish examples.

The stone mound was exposed

The most striking features of Dolmen are the large upright boulders that are frequently supporting a big flat cap stone.  If you believe wikipedia, "dolmen" comes from a Breton term meaning "stone table".  I'm no dolmen expert, but one common form seems to be more-or-less keyhole shaped, with a large open chamber and a long passage ringed by upright stones.  Boulders, cobbles, and earth were piled up around these central megaliths to create a mound.  

Amongst the Vineyards

When excavated, the chambers often contain human remains and burial objects.  If I recall my introductory archaeology courses correctly, these things started popping up when people starting putting down roots and are tied to notions of laying claim to specific territories.  There certainly is a lot of labour involved in building them and once you start filling them up with the bones of your loved ones, I can see them being a pretty important symbol of "home".

The excavation shows the edge of the mound

The three dolmen that we visited were plunked down in the vineyards around Laguardia, Spain, in the Rioja wine growing region.  The largest and best preserved was La Chabola de la Hechicera (The Witch's Hut).  This site was originally found and excavated in the mid-1930s and a few stone axes and human remains were recovered.  When we visited there this fall, it was obviously the subject of renewed investigation.  The entire mound around the central megaliths was exposed and there were photographic markers all over the central stones.  Someone spent some time excavating, photographing, and mapping the site quite recently.  

What do archaeologists do on vacation?  Restring the caution tape around  the archaeology sites they visit.  You're welcome, Spain.

The rocks in the mound weren't that small, either.

La Chabola de la Hechicera (click to enlarge)

Signage!

A few kilometres away from the La Chabola de la Hechicera, we visited El Encinal.  It was interesting to see this site, because all the soil and overburden were still in place.  A small copse of trees seemed to explode out of the edges of the dolmen.  It also wasn't cordoned off by caution tape, so we were able to get closer and explore this structure from the inside.

El Encindal didn't have a capstone in place, but the rocks tilted together to create an enclosed space.

The dolemn is in the bunch of trees.  Those are the Cantabrian Mountains in the background.

What? No one said we couldn't...

I really like how the trees encircle the tomb.

Lookin out the San Martin Dolmen

Some of us were dolmened-out by the time we got to the San Martín Dolmen, but it was right next to the highway, so John and I hopped out and we had 5 minutes to poke around.  Some say we took 7 minutes, but a lot of people were saying a lot of things, so who can be sure what really happened?  This one had a lintel stone over one end of the passage, but it also appeared that the stone mound had been mined to build a small stone shelter, presumably for vineyard workers to use.

That's Laguardia on the hill in the background.

I'm pretty sure this came later and was probably built from the stones gathered up by the Neolithic peoples who built the dolmen.

Looking into the long, narrow San Martin Dolmen. You can see the little shelter on the left side behind the tree.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

I'm an excellent tracer

On Screen Digitizing

So, at work, I'm tracing.  I've been tracing tent ring rocks for the past couple of weeks and I probably have another week or two left.  If I was trying to impress an old classmate, I might call it "on screen digitizing", but really I'm just tracing.

Lori mapping a 1 x 1m unit

 I'm making the feature maps for this summer's final report.  When we excavated the sites, we mapped each 1 x 1m unit that we dug.  We excavated between 50 and 100% of each structure, so depending on the size of the feature, there are anywhere from 1 to 25 individual 1 x 1 m unit maps to stitch together and trace for each tent ring or dwelling.  I'm doing the stitching and tracing in Adobe Illustrator.

Binder full of Unit Plans

The two fat binders of level records were scanned in the field on rain days, so that saves a lot of time this fall.  I'm opening up all of the scanned unit plans, cutting the maps out and pasting them into a new Illustrator document were I finish scaling and fitting them together.  We mapped the unexcavated areas of each feature as well, so those also need to be copied into the new document.  Once everything is in the right position I make a new layer and trace around each rock with the mouse.  Its pretty tedious work.

The tent ring s starting to take shape

I have another stack of feature maps to trace that don't have to be stitched together from multiple sources and I'm going to try tracing those on the iPad.  I'm looking forward to that.  In the meantime, if I go back to posting more vacation photos, I hope you'll forgive me, but you really don't want to see a month of on screen digitizing posts.

This tent ring map was stitched together from 11 hand drawn field maps and is ready for scaling and labeling.  The two squares outline the 8 sq. m that we excavated and the rocks outside those squares were mapped separately. 

Photo Credits: Tim Rast