Detailed Recording of Petroglyphs

Why this process?Why was this process invented? That is a great question. I am not a professional archaeologist, but petroglyphs are definitely an avocation of mine. I love spending time searching for new ones and researching their meanings when possible and appropriate.One problem that I have had with studying petroglyphs is that you can only bring home photographs but photographs do not pick up all the detail in a rock art image.I searched for a process for duplicating Petroglyphs...
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Why this process?Why was this process invented? That is a great question. I am not a professional archaeologist, but petroglyphs are definitely an avocation of mine. I love spending time searching for new ones and researching their meanings when possible and appropriate.One problem that I have had with studying petroglyphs is that you can only bring home photographs but photographs do not pick up all the detail in a rock art image.I searched for a process for duplicating Petroglyphs that would be accurate, not damage or contaminate the Rock Art or Lichens and also be a process that could be accepted by archaeologists specializing in rock art. In the past, archaeologists and amateurs have used rubbings, chalking, cloth tracings, plastic tracings, various rubber casting processes, etc. All these methods have fallen out of favor due to inaccuracies, probable damage caused to the original rock art and/or lichen growths in the area. I would also argue that only the rubber castings truly showed all the detail of the petroglyphs. Some of these processes also required that any lichen growths be completely cleaned from the rock surface. This too has fallen out of favor in recent years. As far as I could tell from my research, there were no "accepted" practices that worked well with the exception of the ultra expensive 3-D laser scanning which is not even available to most researchers. In October 2012 Bob Wheeler of the Copper Country Ancient Sites Conservancy in Houghton, Michigan, told me of an Archaeologist, Jack Steinbring from Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. Jack had published a method he calls an "acrylic dental process" in the Volume 68, Number 4 issue of The Wisconsin Archeologist. This process uses a sheet of aluminum foil taped over the glyph. The grooves were "rubbed" in with Q-tips(r) of all things! You most probably could not hurt a rock with a Q-tip(r)! This didn't sound promising to me at all, but it was an accepted method.The method produced foil images that were nice to look at but they were quite fragile, so they did not seem promising to me. Bob urged me to try to figure out a way to make permanent and durable images from these "foil impressions." He then supplied me with several impressions that he had made of Copper Harbor petroglyphs to experiment with.So that is the "why" but the "how" is a bit more complicated. It took a lot of experimenting with various materials and a lot of trial and error on processes and techniques to get the final process figured out and reliably repeatable. The process in this book is the result.My hope was to document the process well enough to allow most anyone (adults) to duplicate it without too many problems. The materials that are listed by name and retailer are done so because other products are not direct interchanges. This information will save you weeks or even months of trial and error of your own; you should get acceptable results relatively quickly.This book describes the process step by step making it easier to understand why each step is important to the final goal, which is to make "castings" of high enough quality and accuracy to assist researchers and of enough beauty to allow the general public to enjoy and learn to appreciate them. We use some repetition from chapter to chapter. This handbook and our instructions contain easily followed step-by-step procedures together with the needed equipment and supplies. To make the procedure easier without thumbing back and forth, each chapter stands more or less, alone.