CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—Archaeologists from seven different institutions have used 3-D technology to record the rock art of the Valcamonica Valley, located over an area of three square miles in the Italian Alps. Most of the 150,000 images, known as Pitoti, or little puppets, date to the Iron Age, but they span a period of 4,000 years reaching back to the Neolithic period. The images, which included depictions of people, sheep, deer, horses, and dogs, were carved on sandstone rocks that were smoothed when glaciers crossed the landscape. “When I first saw the Pitoti, my immediate thought was that these are frames for a film. Initially I envisaged an animated film but over time I’ve come to realize that the quality of color, the play of light and shadow, and the texture of the rocks, make the Pitoti much more sophisticated than 2-D animated graphics. That’s why we need to work in 3-D,” Frederick Baker of the University of Cambridge said in a press release. To read more about 3-D imaging in archaeology, go to "The Past in High-Def."
