Prior to this discovery, no life-sized Woodland anthropomorphic figures had ever been detected. We have at best a dim understanding of the Woodland worldview. The images are thought to be Woodland Culture. And context is critical if we ever hope to unravel the image’s meaning. Using 3D modeling to reconstruct the cave allows us to not only discover previously unknown artwork, but to view the totality of the engravings on the ceiling in context as a single composition. Much work remains to be done-thousands of images on the cave ceiling have not yet been cataloged.Ī fly through video showing cave art discovered on the ceiling of a Southeastern United States Cave In the video, we’ve “traced” several images and overlaid them on the etchings to make the art more visible. This video derived from the Ancient Art Archive’s 3D model shows the artwork in the 19th Unnamed Cave and the entire expanse of the engraved ceiling. Simek details those discoveries in a May 2022 paper in Antiquity. They’re also the largest cave art images yet discovered in the Americas. In size, they measure up to some of the larger pictographs and petroglyphs of the American West. Moreover, the images are much larger than any previously known in the region. Photogrammetry revealed thousands of additional glyphs and images, most outside the canon of Native American iconography previously detected in the Southeastern United States. The effort proved spectacularly successful. When Cressler noticed additional mud glyphs on the ceiling more than 15 years after that first publication, we launched our project in the 19th Unnamed Cave to see if 3D modeling could reveal additional mud glyphs. Simek of the University of Tennessee described those mud glyphs in a 1999 paper ( here). ![]() ![]() Photographer and cave explorer Alan Cressler was the first modern person to detect artwork in the 19th Unnamed Cave (a random number assigned to protect the cave’s identity). ![]() Woodland culture cave art requires special circumstances to survive-and a highly observant person to notice it. However, the area is a poor preservation environment-abundant humidity and rainfall rapidly degrade most rock art. But the area isn’t well known for rock art, even though the Indigenous inhabitants of the Southeastern United States created it in abundance. We’ve long known that indigenous cave explorers traveled miles underground. The Southeastern United States has more than ten thousand caves. Heat created by the processing power required to compile thousands of images melted the motherboard of our first machine. We had to build an entirely new computer to finish the project. We pushed the capabilities of photogrammetry to the limit in this project-and a little beyond. At the Ancient Art Archive, we use photogrammetry to build VR experiences of cave and rock art sites around the world, but photogrammetry techniques had never been tested as a tool of discovery before our work in this cave. We knew the glyphs existed, but they were so faint it was impossible to make out the full images. Mapping that cave ceiling was one of the Ancient Art Archive’s first projects, a proof-of-concept project designed to see if we could use a 3D mapping technique called photogrammetry to digitally “see” cave art-in this case faint mud glyphs-on the ceiling of a cave in the Southern United States. They are not recognizable characters from ethnographically recorded South-east Native American stories, nor from archaeologically known iconographic materials. We have not seen their like before, we do not know the identity of these ancient cave art anthropomorphs. Simek describes the significance of these previously unknown cave engravings. The Ancient Art Archive was able to accomplish the fine-scale 3D modeling that enabled this discovery thanks to a grant from the Lyndhurst Foundation.ĭr. Indigenous cave art discovered on the ceiling of a Southeastern Cave. Jan Simek of the University of Tennessee used digital 3D modeling techniques to discover previously unknown, large-scale Indigenous cave art on the ceiling of a cave in the Southeastern United States. The Ancient Art Archive and board member Dr. Above, Stephen Alvarez works on building a 3D model of cave art in an unnamed cave in the American Southeast.
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