Application of Non-Destructive Techniques to the Recording and Modelling of Palaeolithic Rock Art
Diego González‐Aguilera, Pablo Rodríguez‐Gonzálvez, Juan Mancera-Taboada, Angel Muoz-Nieto, Jesús Herrero-Pascual, Javier Gómez‐Lahoz, Inmaculada Picon-Cabrer · InTech eBooks · 2011
Introduction 1.1 MotivationAccording to Spanish legislation and international organisations such as UNESCO, the Council of Europe and the European Union, historical and artistic heritages should be preserved and placed in the service of society for either cultural, scientific or educational purposes.Thus, it is necessary to document and invest in their preservation, restoration, rehabilitation and/or archival for subsequent scientific studies (Elwazani, 2003), in addition to documenting their dissemination and social value.Archaeological remains are part of peoples' historical artistic heritage and represent a testimony of their past.The attitude and sensibility towards this cultural inheritance say much about our future as a society.The documentation of general heritage and particularly archaeological heritage properties is indispensable before performing any type of measure or intervention.Such documentation implies recording, storing, cataloguing and measuring the elements that compose the heritage property.With regards to archaeological heritage, these tasks are developed both with elements that comprise movable heritage (for example, bone and lithic industries) and with elements that comprise non-movable heritage (for example, buildings, fields and caves).The geometric component of archaeological documentation begins with measurement and has the objective of a graphical representation, using multiple strategies and support.The act of measuring implies a quantification of the spatial characteristics of an object, especially its shape, dimensions, orientation and location, both in its immediate environment and in relation to the global geographic context.In the geographic documentation of heritage, the measurement and graphical representation are indivisible tasks.Particularly, the traditional procedures of documentation and graphical representation are based on employing equipment that has a low cost and is easy to use.Despite the effectiveness of these procedures, they exhibit a series of inconveniences, such as the large amount of time required to acquire data, the limit of work within a twodimensional scope, the loss of information during data transfer and the need to physically www.intechopen.