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Database Created for the Rock Art Archive’s Pontoni Collection
By Ed Schoch
Date: 2/12/09
The Pontoni collection documents several rock arts sites in Baja California. The collection encompasses 39 large loose-leaf binders containing over 9,000 pages of material consisting of written descriptions of individual rock art images, statistical summaries of the types of images at each site or portion of a site, maps of sites showing locations of the documented rock art images, and hand sketches and photographs of images.
The first task was to rearrange a few sections of the collection where the material was out of order, then hand number all 9,000 plus pages. Using Paradox the database was established by creating a form for entering the data. Each form has fields for the site name and the area number and section number within the site together with the starting and ending album (binder) and page numbers for the material covering a given area or section. The form also has check boxes to indicate if the material in an area or section includes summary statistical data, descriptive sheets on individual images, maps, and/or photos. Lastly there is a space for comments. After creating the form the data was entered from the binders, resulting in 471 form records. This project took two years to complete.
Ed Schoch has been a volunteer at the Rock Art Archive for five years and is currently establishing a bibliography database for the archive correspondence file.
