Virtual Reality Bears Ears
The Bears Ears Digital Cultural Heritage Initiative is a group of anthropologists, archaeologists, and indigenous communities collaborating to create virtual reality experiences and photogrammetric models of significant sites in the Bears Ears National Monument. We talk with Eric Heller, professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, Noah Pleshet, assistant professor of anthropology at the university of New Brunswick, and Ben Bellorado, assistant curator at the Arizona State Museum about their methods and the importance of involving descendant communities in the interpretation and preservation of these sacred sites. We talk about the educational and preservation goals of the initiative, the involvement of indigenous students and community members, and the future potential for expanding this technology-driven approach to cultural heritage.
Dr. Eric Heller is a social landscape archaeologist who specializes in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Currently, his research focuses on the political economics of non-royal elite households in Classic Maya society, the development of digital phenomenological approaches, and creating public-facing collaborative and community-oriented virtual reality experiences for cultural heritage applications.
Benjmain A. Bellorado, PhD is the Assistant Curator of Archaeology at the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona. For over 25 years, Dr. Bellorado has conducted research as an anthropological archaeologist specializing in the study of the ancient cultures of the Four Corners area of the US Southwest. His work focuses on understanding the ways that ancient cultures interacted with the social and natural worlds and how identities are expressed through clothing and other decorated media. Through collaborative research with descendant communities, archaeological fieldwork, and collections-based research, Dr. Bellorado uses archaeological methods to reinforce and strengthen Indigenous ties to landscapes and to advocate for the preservation of cultural resources in the Bears Ears National Monument and across the greater Southwest.
Dr. Noah Pleshet (he/him/his) is an applied sociocultural and environmental anthropologist who studies how culture and language affect human experiences of environmental change, the management of cultural and natural resources, and human-nonhuman animal interactions. He completed his PhD at New York University in 2016, and has ongoing research projects in central Australia and the American Southwest. Dr. Pleshet has a decade of experience as a practicing and applied anthropologist, focused on working with Indigenous Australian and Native North American Tribal governments, communities, and organizations. This work included research related to cultural resource management initiatives, impact assessments for Infrastructure developments, cultural landscape and place studies, and consultations for natural resource management actions.
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Interview Excerpt - Collaboration for Preservation
We talk with Eric Heller, Ben Bellarado, and Noah Pleshet about the intersection of science, art, and ethnographic interviews that come together to create a virtual reality platform in which to experience sacred sites in Southeast Utah.
Science Moab: Today we’re talking about the Bears Ears Digital Cultural Heritage Initiative. Can you describe what this initiative entails?
Heller: It’s a really complex thing to describe, honestly, because we have multiple Moving parts all going on at the same time that are mutually reinforcing one another on one level. We are in the kind of content creation business or in a content creation paradigm where we’re producing a virtual reality experiences and photogrammetric models for scientific purposes, but at the same time, we’re also working with native tribes in the region to not only produce that content, but also to teach and train and work hand in hand with them to create these models and ultimately these VR experiences that are deeply informed by their vision and their design criteria.
Pleshet: the Bears Ears Digital Cultural Heritage Initiative came out of a long term work that’s been done at a variety of sites in the Bears Ears National Monument by Dr.Bellarado and Dr. Heller. And the goal is to collaboratively produce virtual reality experiences with descendant communities who have ties to that area and to also involve Youth and others from the communities in both interpreting these places for these experiences and in producing.
Science Moab: Who is collaborating to make this happen?
Bellorado: In addition to our three institutions, that’s University of Southern California, University of Arizona’s Arizona State Museum and the University of New Brunswick, we’re working with the National Forest Service, specifically the Monticello Field Office of the National Forest Service, which is in charge of the Manti LaSal National Forest. We are also working with the Bureau of Land Management, the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County, and The Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah. The tribal groups we’ve been working with on this particular part of the project are the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department and the Zuni Cultural Resource Advisory Team.
Science Moab: You are trying to create a virtual reality product for the Bears Ears. How do you physically go about digitizing a site and or preparing it for virtual reality?
Heller: We largely use a technique called photogrammetry, which is essentially the art and science of taking a series of overlapping pictures, then using software that will allow you to stitch those pictures together and find common matching points in 3D space using essentially the principles of parallax. One of our sites at Horse Rock, we have some 2,600 photos taken with a drone and a handheld DSLR camera. We build up a model that’s suitable for virtual reality by using a variety of software packages including Agisoft Metashape Pro, Blender, and then ultimately the Unreal Engine to do the visualization.
The end result of what we’re going for here is taking these photogrammetric models, into the Unreal Engine, the game development platform, and then splicing in other types of media, primarily audio content derived from ethnographic interviews typically conducted directly on site.
Then the user, when they put on the headset, will be able to wander through this virtual environment and as they encounter different content areas through location based triggers, or when they look at a particular thing, those audio tracks will cue, and they’ll be able to listen to the largely interpretive content directly from our our native partners.
Science Moab: Do you see this type of initiative going far into the future?
Heller: I certainly do. This particular round of funding really allowed us to actually do some of our early forays into scanning and producing visual content, but also to work with the descendant communities, both as content creation partners and as a mutual teaching and learning relationship as well. There’s a lot of potential for this kind of work. We’re certainly not the only people working in this space, but I think one of the things that really sets us apart is we’re really deeply invested in building long term relationships with descendant communities.
The technologies are relatively accessible…you can learn it in a day, but to master it and to really get to a level where you feel the confidence to begin crafting your own narratives and sharing your own visual stories, that takes years, and we’re here for that.
Bellorado: The thing we really focused on this year was switching from just creating the model to actually teaching photogrammetry and ethnographic interviews as well. That’s the workshop model we developed and it captured people’s interest in different ways. We had tribal students and college students attend our workshops and we showed them how photogrammetry and ethnographic interviews work.
Pleshet: It has really been a long period through which we’ve developed these relationships, with descendant communities, federal agencies, and the universities and museums we’ve worked with. What really got things to a different level this summer is the focus on an educational aspect, both in field context and in these workshops where we looked at the photogrammetric data.
What really got people excited and thinking differently is that we shifted the focus to the kind of education and knowledge aspect and away from the model product aspect. Going forward, both the descendant community and the agency perspectives are really interested in this kind of education and knowledge focus of the Bears Ears project.
