Experience in documenting Shul’gan-Tash (Kapova) cave and the surrounding landscape with modern methods

Kapova (Shul’gan-Tash) Cave (Burzyanskiy district, Republic of Bashkortostan) is one of the largest karst caves on the western slopes of the Southern Urals and a natural, historical and cultural site. Until recently, maps and topographic plans of the cave made in the 1970s were used, these maps and plans were not accurate and contained a lot of errors. Comprehensive documenting of the cave karst cavern was undertaken in 2017 to create a set of interconnected spatial data describing the karst cavern, its landscape, geological context and Palaeolithic drawings. National and world experience in mapping caves shows that rock drawings in caves are often documented without determining their precise spatial position. However, this information is critically important for preservation of drawings. This exercise is intended to create a digital model of this cave site of Palaeolithic art. To conduct follow-up studies and preserve Kapova Cave, it is necessary to summarize information on the nature of dripstone deposits on its walls, areas excavated by earlier archaeological expeditions, location of finds and selected samples, engineering constructions, monitoring system sensors by integrating these data into a digital information model of the cave. This model will support research at different levels of details and will help to study links between the karst cavern and the top surface proposing analytical or methodological protocols with the use of 3D modeling and geoinformation technologies.