Recording of Petroglyph Park

WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2008
UCR gets grant to fund high-tech methods of classifying ancient artifacts
3:53 p.m. July 28, 2008

RIVERSIDE – Developing high-tech methods of recognizing and classifying ancient Native American artifacts will be the focus of a UC Riverside project financed by a National Science Foundation grant, it was announced Monday.
The NSF awarded the university $805,000 to cover three years of expenses connected with the project, officially titled “Tools to Mine and Index Trajectories of Physical Artifacts,” according to UCR.

UCR anthropology professor Sang Hee-Lee and UCR computer science and engineering professor Eamon Keogh will lead a team of researchers tasked with creating a program capable of quickly recognizing Indian artifacts by shape and quality.
University officials said the goal will be archiving data from one place to the next and seeing how it all compares.

“By taking advantage of recent advances in data-mining and indexing, a massive amount of useful information can potentially be extracted from the anthropological resources that abound in North America,” said Keogh.

Among the first challenges is documenting UCR's own collection of more than one million arrowheads, officials said. The roughly 20,000 petroglyphs in New Mexico's Petroglyph Park will also be recorded, according to UCR.

Keogh said building databases of early Native American images, beads and tools might yield clues about the development and spread of different cultural practices.

He cited the use of “spatiotemporal predicates” to solve unanswered questions, such as whether the curved style of an arrowhead found in Oklahoma indicates that the tool originated with the Caddo Indian Tribe and was later adopted by tribes farther south – 6,000 to 9,000 years ago.

The grant-funded research could also address some contemporary concerns, according to UCR. By archiving graffiti styles, law enforcement could use the UCR program to track the propagation of certain street gang “tags,” officials said.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/riverside/20080728-1553-ucrgrant.html