Dominique Rissolo is an archaeologist and associate research scientist with the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI) at the Qualcomm Institute. He has worked closely with UC San Diego students – in the lab and in the field – since 2015. Dominique is actively involved in the development of digital workflows for the analysis and visualization of multimodal data from cultural heritage sites and has enabled collaborating researchers to expand their technical capabilities. Dominique has been exploring and mapping caves and tunnels for most of his career and has recently been focusing on optimal data acquisition strategies for dark, remote, and submerged environments. He is also an associate director of the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology and co-directs the Hoyo Negro Project.
The often complex, multilevel morphologies of caves and tunnels offer ideal test environments for the combination of SLAM-based mobile LiDAR systems and photogrammetry for the documentation and mapping of subterranean archaeological sites. Recent research has involved systematic scanning of caves and architectural tunnels in Belize and on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. A range of deployment strategies were developed, and varying data-capture techniques were employed, for the purpose of comparing the results of separate scans of the same environments and evaluation against existing datasets from different scanning or surveying modalities. Current efforts hope to inform the use of photogrammetry and mobile LiDAR systems in caves with an emphasis on the specific objectives or expectations of a given scanning project while cautioning against the uncritical embracing of rapid-capture technologies.