Archeologists are confronting an "unfathomable" loss as the US border wall is set to cut across ranches that are home to unique historical sites in Texas, many of which haven't been fully studied. Outrage has exploded over border infrastructure that recently began tearing up pristine desert landscapes in Big Bend National Park. But there's a quieter battle taking place on private lands in Texas, where the US border wall is set to cut across some of North America's richest archaeological sites, digging up ancient indigenous artifacts and fracturing millennia-old rock art in its path. The US Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection awarded billions of dollars in contracts this year toward the construction of a wall and other barriers in West Texas along a remote 500-plus-mile (800-plus-kilometer) riverfront expanse of the US-Mexico border that includes Big Bend National Park and other idyllic parklands. Bipartisan backlash against border wall construction in the national park was swift, ultimately prompting DHS to scuttle plans for a 30-foot steel bollard wall, instead replacing it with miles of riverside vehicle barriers and 200-plus miles of road construction.

The'incredibly beautiful' cave carvings show how humans thrived in the Arabian desert. The engravings are traced to show 19 life-sized camels and 3 equids. Naturalistic animals belonging to the middle phase are traced in white. The more stylized and standardized depictions of the later phase traced in blue. Unidentified lines traced in black.

Researchers have developed a process using Machine Learning (ML) methods to find rock art in remote, hard-to-access areas of Australia. The study, co-led by Dr. Andrea Jalandoni, a digital archaeologist from Griffith University's Center for Social and Cultural Research, was published in the Aug. 2022 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. In the study, university researchers trained a ML model to detect whether painted rock art was present in an image by feeding it hundreds of images of rock art found in Kakadu National Park. The model achieved an impressive 89% success rate. Dr. Jalandoni told the Australian Associated Press, "Our machine learning model picks up whether an area photographed potentially contains previously undiscovered rock art, scientists can then go in and verify if there is rock art present and do more research."

ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA--Cosmos Magazine reports that Daryl Wesley of Flinders University and Mimal and Marrku Traditional Owners of the Wilton River area used machine learning to analyze changes in rock art styles in northern Australia's Arnhem Land. The computer was supplied with information of more than 1,000 types of objects and a mathematical model to determine how similar two images are to one another. The model was then applied to images of the rock art. "One amazing outcome is that the machine learning approach ordered the styles in the same chronology that archaeologists have ordered them in by inspecting which appear on top of which," said team member Jarrad Kowlessar of Flinders University. Styles of artwork that are closer to each other in age are also closer to each other in appearance, he explained.

Their meaning has been lost in ancient history but the distinctive marks on rocks by our ancestors thousands of years ago provide a unique link to our prehistoric past. Now a new project has been launched in an attempt to finally unravel some of the mysteries of the prehistoric rock art carved into stones in Scotland. Experts are to create a new digital database using 3D scanning to record and study more than 2,000 carvings across the country. Cup and ring marks are a form of prehistoric art found widely through out the world. They consist of a round indentation – the cup – surrounded by a series of concentric circles that look like ripples on water.