Chuck Sutherland

Throughout a caver's career, certain caves stand out as important, or defining to them. Unnamed Cave 61 is the cave that stands out for me (the cave does have a name, but in the convention of archaeological sites, we do not share its name). I was present when the discovery of its prehistoric art was first made. I initially brought cavers there on a lead by a neighbor. We believed that we were the first to have documented the cave, but later learned that it had been previously described, but the location was wrong. I corrected the error and merged the records within the Tennessee Cave Survey dataset. This cave I have come to think of as "mine" though I in no way own or have any particular claim to it. All that serves to preface my walkthrough of the cave, and its amazing contents. In this first image of the panel, one can see it naturally. It was photographed with painted light from a headlamp by a tripod mounted camera at close...

For approximately the last year I have been working with a small team of cavers to document and map a new cave find in Tennessee. Despite only having mapped six miles of cave passage, we have found that the cave is absurdly enormous in terms of volume. The geology and formations of the cave are so massive as to be confusing. Not to be overdramatic, but the mechanisms of it's development call into question much of what we understand about cave development in general. In other words, this one is a game changer. Among its many discoveries is a river system on par with that of the Cumberland River. A breakdown crawl at the entrance, followed by a nearly vertical scramble on breakdown of about 180' brings you to the gigantic river passage. The mostly phreatic borehole here runs for most of the mapped length of the cave as a network of braided passage varying in height between 20' - 140' in some places. Familiar, but bizarrely huge formations peak down on us from galleri...

While I am by no means the expert at either of the things this blog post is about, I know a little more than the average Joe. I provide this knowledge here to those curious, and for my own records. The information provided here is especially relevant to the southeastern United States. If you are from elsewhere you may find that not all the information I provide suits your environment, the types of petroglyphs you have, or your photography needs. Early along in my caving career it was shared with me that some of the sites we were visiting had prehistoric records in the form of pictographs and petroglyphs. Pictographs are painted onto the wall with a medium, like charcoal, or red ochre. Petroglyphs, or glyphs, are incised marks on stone. The two are different enough to warrant separate articles on how to photograph and image. If you are interested in photographing pictographs, check out this article I wrote on the subject. I should note that the techniques I provide here for imaging petr...

As someone who caves and explores, I sometimes find historic, or apparently historic signatures on rocks and in caves. While I am by no means an expert, I know a few things which may serve to help others provide evidence towards authenticating historic or prehistoric markings. I want to note that we very rarely every know with certainty most things. What we can do is document the evidence and see where it points us. I should also point out that in modern times leaving a signature or a drawing in caves or on overlooks is not only a criminal act, but an unethical act. The study of how humans have previously marked their landscape is in no way advertising that we should also do the same - in fact the opposite. I will write more on this later, but leave any petty or trifiling argumentation regarding what's historic and acceptible here. The remainder of this article shall be strictly about identification. Now, imagine that we've been wandering in the woods for hours and come upo...

March 3rd, 2020 a deadly tornado touched down in Putnam County, Tennessee. It's 8.2 mile path destroyed more than 100 homes and left a normally happy community heartbroken and distraught. A week on, this is an analysis of what happened using GIS data and aerial imagery. How do we get to the above map? The track was provided by National Weather Service (NWS). The track buffer was made using attribute data provided by NWS. NWS update for Putnam County Tornado Regions affected: Putnam County, City of Baxter, City of Cookeville Max Rating: EF-4 Max Winds: 175 mph Path Length: 8.2 miles Path Width: 500 yards Time on the ground: 8 min Forward speed: 65 mph Buildings destroyed: 100 Road Crossings: 35 Affected Area (500 yard buffer of tornado path) Buildings within affected area: 1,812 Landuse: Land use / Land cover Acres Percent Agriculture 1,220.34 38.78% Commercial 194.65 6.18% Industrial 56.76 1.80% Public/Semi-Public Uses 113.28 3.60% R...

D-Stretch is an image enhancement technique that I first learned about when I saw it applied to prehistoric pictographs. There is a plugin to the software ImageJ which will handle an image and produce a d-stretched version of it that can be found here . However, as someone who is comfortable working with digital images in Photoshop, I wondered if there was a way to replicate the effect in house. Here I present to you what I learned, and some thoughts on the process. Let's start with a photograph of the Horned Dog, a particularly well preserved red ocre pictograph in Tennessee. The photograph was shot as raw, and processed for optimal display. White balance was adjusted based on the scale present in the image. We will want to convert the image to the Lab color space to proceed (Image > Mode > Lab Color). Check your channels tab, you should see these three channels present: Lightness, A, and B. We'll be individually adjusting these channels so keep this handy....