LOW COST 3D RECONSTRUCTION OF CAVE PAINTINGS FOR THE CONSERVATION OF COLOMBIAN HISTORICAL MEMORY: CASE STUDY INDIGENOUS ROCK ART OF THE SACRED PLACE “PIEDRAS DE TUNJO”

Abstract. Anthropic activities are produced by constant human activity in nature which, over time, account for the different civilizations. Rock art allows through pictorial manifestations to capture these anthropic activities, which in many parts of the world are preserved as cultural heritage. Colombia, unfortunately, has an incipient development with the conservation of its cultural and intangible heritage, which has had little progress in recent times, if it is about indigenous cave paintings (Méndez-Vargas, 2019). According to history, the first settlers of the Bogotá Savannah lived in the area currently called "Las Piedras de Tunjo" considered a sacred place by the Muiscas - our ancestors. This area located in the municipality of Facatativá, and is currently constituted as one of the five archaeological parks that Colombia has, is 27 hectares and is located at a height of 2600 meters above sea level. In 1912, Rosales, seeing the spatial richness, stated that these stones should be looked at with interest and carefully cared for, because apart from the rugged beauty of the site, they witnessed important events for Colombia. The pictographs on the rock are now believed to date back more than 12,000 years. Although there are multiple images and videos of the site, this project seeks to approach the 3D reconstruction of an area of the park through SfM photogrammetry (Structure-from-Motion - Westoby, 2012) with a low-cost and easy-to-implement methodology (Santagati et al., 2017; Tavera et al., 2019) to promote historical conservation and Colombian cultural heritage in an indigenous sacred place to democratize it. This work documents different experiments and their results, of the 3D reconstruction using different data sources and software that will allow it to be an input in archeology to better understand the indigenous history of the area that was deteriorated in the 20th century.
