Digitizing and documenting heritage for conservation, a case study: Chiribiquete national park archaeological site

Abstract

This paper presents the documentation carried out by the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) in collaboration with the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH) to support the conservation of the archaeological pictographs in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Chiribiquete National Park, Colombia; listed in 2018. This project entitled Preserving the past: preventive conservation on World Heritage Site Chiribiquete National Park and its buffer zone (Colombia) is funded by the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP) and managed by the Fundacion Erigaie. The dense rainforest landscape includes a mountain range with Tepuis inscribed with Paleoindian pictographs, painted and layered over time. The area was the site of the Colombian armed conflict that ended in 2016 and now remains remote and highly inaccessible. High-resolution 3D dense clouds and meshes of the painted Tepuis were created to record the pictographs with a high level of detail. This method of non-destructive investigation results in minimal impact on the biological environment of the site and on the uncontacted Indigenous communities who continue to inhabit the area, and the results will enable further remote investigation of the pictographs. Such tools demonstrated effectiveness while communicating the mass, scale of the site, colour, and texture of the pictographs at a high level of detail. The non-invasive nature of the immersive documentation is a powerful tool in the ongoing conservation and management of the site by mitigating the impact of tourism, by providing a remote method of sharing and experiencing the archaeological site.