Maya Vase Rollout Photography’s Past, Present, and Potential in a Cross-Discipline Digital Future: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Abstract

Vase rollout photography has emerged as an invaluable tool for artifact study and documentation, offering scholars a comprehensive, 360-degree perspective of an object’s painted imagery and hieroglyphic texts. Over the past five decades, the creation of vase rollout images has predominantly relied on film and a specialized workstation pioneered by photographer and Mayanist Justin Kerr. The transition to modern digital methods has been gradual, characterized by limited and predominantly manual efforts. This thesis investigates the historical trajectory, current status, and potential future of digital vase rollout photography within the realm of archaeological documentation and study. This thesis hypothesizes that recent advancements in digital photography coupled with image-processing and image understanding techniques from the field of computer vision can be integrated to automate the process of creating rollouts. The research and results presented here demonstrate that automated digital rollout images can be created with high quality and fidelity, suitable for use as a new standard form of artifact archival documentation. Through a novel combination of commercial off-the-shelf hardware and purpose built software, this thesis introduces a proof-of-concept experiment showcasing the attainability of excellent quality software-generated digital rollouts in a platform that requires minimal investment. The digital rollout archive made possible by this method is envisioned as a potentially valuable resource, supplying the necessary digital inputs for the creation of yet-to-be-developed artifact analysis tools in the future.