Stone Age goes digital at Fish Hoek museum
The Fish Hoek Valley Museum has entered the digital age with its artefacts and attractions being scanned for an archive that will be available to history lovers, researchers, scholars and others online.
The digital archiving its being done by Global Digital Heritage Afrika (GDHA), an affiliate of Global Digital Heritage, an international non-profit organisation based in America, dedicated to the digital documentation of heritage.
They work in partnership with the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at UCT to preserve and democratise architectural heritage.
They use digital visualisation, 3D virtualisation, geospatial informatics and open-access solutions to provide digital data and 3D models of historic sites and artefacts.
GDHA’s deputy chief scientist, Bruce McDonald, said some of the items scanned at the museum last month were already available on the Sketchfab website.
During the three-day process, he said, about 50 objects were captured using laser scanning to create 360-degree pictures that can be used to offer a virtual tour of the museum, two-dimensional photos, and 3D modelling of some ancient stone tools from Peers Cave.
On Tuesday May 28, the team 3D scanned Peers Cave and captured some of its rock art.
“The rock art is very faded, and there is so much graffiti up there. We have managed to capture it in its current state and preserve it for future generations,” he said.
The Fish Hoek Valley Museum, known for its collection of local artefacts, especially its collection from Peers Cave, chronicles the history and pre-history of the Fish Hoek valley including Clovelly, Silvermine, Noordhoek, Ocean View, Masiphumelele, Kommetjie, Scarborough, and Brakkloof.
The project was initiated by museum volunteer Brian Martin, who has, since 2017, scanned “thousands” of the museum’s photographs and documents to create a digital archive.
He said hard copies at the museum were at risk of being lost or damaged and a digital archive was essential.
He said he was aware of work being done by GDHA and he had known Mr McDonald for many years and had followed his career closely on Facebook.
“He was at school with my daughter, and his grandfather was my cub master in the 1960s,” he said, adding that he was excited to get a call from Mr McDonald to say GDH in America had made additional funding available for services in local communities.
He introduced Mr McDonald to museum curator Sally Britten, and the process was started.
Ms Britten said Mr McDonald had shown her examples of GDHA’s work, and it was “indeed an opportunity not to be missed”.
Work started on Tuesday May 21 with the capturing of the finest examples of stone tools from Peers Cave.
“It was a slow and careful process using their incredible new equipment recently received from the USA. The team went on to use a different digital camera process to capture the larger objects like whale bones,” she said.
The GDHA team had travelled all over Africa, capturing large heritage sites, and it was the first time they had captured smaller objects at a museum, she said.
The museum's collection of ancient stone tools has been gathered in the Fish Hoek valley since the 1920s. Peers Cave and its surrounds have yielded many stone tools from the early, middle and late Stone Age.
Peers Cave - formerly Schildersgat - is the only archaeological site in the south peninsula where rock art has been found, and it is a burial site of 10 Stone Age people, including Fish Hoek Man, who is believed to have lived 12 000 years ago, according to the museum.
In the 1920s, the excavation of the cave by Fish Hoek residents Victor Peers and his son, Bertie, was heralded as one of the most important archaeological digs by the world's top scientists of the day, and a large delegation from several countries visited the cave in 1929.
For more information about the GDHA, visit globaldigitalheritage.org and to view the 3D images from the museum, visit sketchfab.com
The Museum is open Tuesday to Friday, from 9.30am to noon at 59 Central Circle, Fish Hoek.
