Abstract
The Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave has yielded 1550 identifiable fossil elements – representing the largest single collection of fossil hominin material found on the African continent to date. The fossil chamber in which Homo naledi was found was accessible only through a near-vertical chute that presented immense practical and methodological limitations on the excavation and recording methods that could be used within the Cave. In response to practical challenges, a multimodal set of recording and survey methods was thus developed and employed: (1) recording of fossils and the excavation process was achieved through the use of white-light photogrammetry and laser scanning; (2) mapping of the Dinaledi Chamber was accomplished by means of high-resolution laser scanning, with scans running from the excavation site to the ground surface and the cave entrance; (3) at ground surface, the integration of conventional surveying techniques as well as photogrammetry with the use of an unmanned aerial vehicle was applied. Point cloud data were used to provide a centralised and common data structure for conversion and to corroborate the influx of different data collection methods and input formats. Data collected with these methods were applied to the excavations, mapping and surveying of the Dinaledi Chamber and the Rising Star Cave. This multimodal approach provides a comprehensive spatial framework from individual bones to landscape level.
Highlights
The field recovery of hominin fossils and other skeletal remains is a process which owes much of its practical and epistemological background to prehistoric archaeology and archaeological field techniques
The recording process of any site usually follows the traditional archaeological field recording and requires at least two fixed reference points from which the fieldworker can extrapolate the position of any bone or sample within a deposit, using basic spatial geometry
Data collection techniques used at the Rising Star Cave ranged from landscape level, down to scanning in-situ fossils (Figure 3)
Summary
The field recovery of hominin fossils and other skeletal remains is a process which owes much of its practical and epistemological background to prehistoric archaeology and archaeological field techniques. Adequate survey and mapping techniques allow investigators to maintain a record of where every item of evidence was found within a defined area, allowing the investigator to recreate the order of events that took place from when the deposit was first exposed, to final recovery. In many respects the practical fundamentals of field recording of bones, artefacts, dating and sediment samples, is a largely unchanged component of archaeological field skills, and can use items as simple as tape measures, plumb-bobs, and pencil and drafting film, up to the level of electronic distance measuring devices, the Global Positioning System (GPS), photogrammetry and non-contact surface laser scanning.[1] Regardless of the level of technology utilised, it is critical that any recording system allows the archaeologist or palaeoanthropologist to accurately record, plot and model the contexts and contents of a site as precisely as possible in three dimensions. Whether the expected outcome is hand-drawn maps and plans, or three-dimensional computerised models of a site, the fundamental principles are the same
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