Virtual Prehistory portable art collection of Siberian Mal’ta-Buret’ culture: ways of documenting, classification and representation

Abstract

Modern research of museum archaeological collections, their attribution and digitizing are relevant questions of science, culture, and education in the world. The paper presents archaeological materials of the Siberian Upper Paleolithic sites Mal’ta and Buret’ and the ways of their systematization and documentation in a form of an information system on the internet. The system has a full-fledged item attribution, scientific description and extensive multimedia support including 3D models and macro photographs. The collections were obtained during the excavations under the direction of M. M. Gerasimov and A. P. Okladnikov, carried out in the early to mid-20th century ; the unique artifacts from the collections are kept in the funds of various museums in different cities of Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Irkutsk) in a scattered and unsystematic form. Our project is aimed to the developing of the documentation of unique items from the collection of the Upper Paleolithic Mal’ta-Buret’ archaeological culture and presenting the results in a systematic way with visual materials. The collection includes a number of anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, ornithomorphic figurines, ornamented discs and plates, as well as items of personal ornamentation, and other unique artefacts. As part of the project, we took photographs and macro photographs of the objects, their 3D models using the photogrammetry method, made a detailed description and collected all available publications on them, both modern and the earliest. The art objects of the fragmented collection are systematized and presented in the form of a single virtual collection on the Internet – Information System of Mal’ta and Buret’ Mobile Art. Descriptions, photographic images and three-dimensional models of objects, the results of microscopic studies and trace analysis have been published.