Explore the Extraordinary Paintings of
P L E I T O C A V E
Wind Wolves Preserve, Kern County, California
Celebrating Ancient Technologies through New Technologies
Pleito is a unique and sacred space for Native Californians; and for many it is simply celebrated for it's complex and extraordinary displays of artwork. Through ongoing research, we aim to share the distant knowledge and skills which have been captured at Pleito, so that these unequalled paintings may be respected, preserved and protected by all people, Native and non-Native.
Created by the hands of Native Californians over potentially thousands of years, the paintings found at Pleito are unlike those found anywhere else in the United States. Pleito displays one of the widest colour palettes of any site in the world, with variants of red, black, white, cream, yellow, orange, green and blue pigments repeatedly being used so that older paintings are buried underneath newer ones: a term called superimposition.
Within the Main Cave of the site, there are 12 multi-coloured, or polychrome panels, comprising many hundreds of individual elements with likely the greatest intensity of superimposed painting of any pictograph site on the North American continent. For this reason, the famous rock-art researcher Campbell Grant (1978: 532) described the site as the “finest example of prehistoric rock art in the United States.”
We welcome you to learn about the cave and it's paintings, as well as the history and goals of the project “Unravelling the Gordian Knot”.
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Learn About the Project: Why Pleito Cave?
Project history, goals, methods and techniques, personnel, and bibliography
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Explore Pleito Cave Through Archeology
Excavations at Pleito Creek, and Rock Art Documentation
THE
TEAM
Principal Investigator
David Robinson
Co-Principal Investigator, Analytical work
Matthew Baker
Co-Principal Investigator, Website design
Jenn Perry
Ph.D Researcher, Analytical work
Clare Bedford
Virtual Reality
Brendan Cassidy
Gavin Sim
Rock Art Documentation Group, Conditional Assessment
Antoinette Padgett
Rick Bury
Film and Photogrammetry Assistance
Joshua Roth
Colin Rosemont
Infrared Photography
David Wheatley
Ph.D Researcher. Photogrammetry and Film
Devlin Gandy
Laser Scanning
James Miles
Post-Doctoral Researcher, RTI and Matrix
Eleni Kotoula
Post-Doctoral Researcher, Analytical work
Cerys Jenkins
Native Voices
Matthew Vestuto
Sandra Hernandez
This project has been awarded funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
'Unraveling the Gordian Knot: Integrating Advanced Portable Technologies into the Analysis of Rock Art Superimposition' (Grant number AH/L014041/1).



