Articles by Stéphane Jaillet

Up to now Geographic Information Systems have rarely been used to study decorated caves. The research conducted for more than 12 years now in the Chauvet cave required a unifying tool that would collect, on the same support, all of the different types of information gathered from the various fields of research involved in the study of the cave. The objective was to find a system that could centralize and cross reference all of the information acquired. Besides just a filing system, this tool was also needed to promote the development of new research for a better comprehension of the cave and the way in which it was occupied. The diversity of the data to be integrated and the needs of the different disciplines required a co-constructive approach to the support and to the means for representing the data. In order to be able to cross-reference both the data collected from the soil and from the walls we decided to direct the GIS developments towards the integration of three dimensional information. The first GIS applied to caves with paintings should also be a useful reference tool for the study of other caves in the future. This article is intended to describe the different stages we passed through for the implementation of this tool, by analyzing the limitations, the choices made and the prospects we envisage.

Since laser scanning first appeared, 3D restitutions are used increasingly on decorated archaeological and rock art sites. This communication aims at presenting such restitutions (from field data collection to modeling) as applied to the Chauvet Cave. It addresses a diversified set of questions. We shall start with questions raised by karstologists, for whom 3D models represent the base of a geomorphologic pattern and are then used to model, as close to reality as possible, landscapes as they were at the time of the human occupation of the site. From then on, other fields will benefit from the model. Our challenge is to include in the final virtual reality output all the requirements of geomorphology, archaeology, and cultural mediation in order to render the extraordinary richness of the Chauvet Cave.