On Friday, May 17, Jon Harman will give a public presentation during which he shares a multi-day journey to rock image sites in Baja. The free event takes place at Nevada City’s Madelyn Helling Library on Maidu Ave. at 7pm.
Jon is well known for his work in Baja studying Mexico’s ancient and unusual imagery, often working closely with the Mexican government’s anthropology agency, Instituto Nacional de Anthropologia e Historia (INAH).
His presentation will focus on a mule trip he and his wife Sheila took into the remote valley of El Valle. In describing this remarkable journey, Jon says, “We camped at several ranchos….met wonderful people living in a very isolated place, and visited beautiful rock art sites.”
As well as sharing all of that with the audience, Jon will describe his search for a grove of unique trees from which a Spanish priest procured enough wood to build his own ship in the early 1700s.
Jon, who has a PhD in mathematics and has worked as a medical imaging consultant, is renowned for developing the DStretch program which has revolutionized rock image studies. The program, which can be downloaded onto a smart phone or a computer, shifts the color of images to create contrast and make them more visible. While it works best for pictographs or painted images, in some cases it can work with petroglyphs or pecked/scratched images. For this achievement, he was given the Hellen C. Smith Award by the Society for California Archaeology.
Jon has been involved in photographing, surveying, and recording rock image sites in the western United States, Africa, and France, as well as in Baja. He has worked with U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management archaeologists.
Friends of Sierra Rock Art, which is sponsoring the event, works with the Tahoe National Forest, other agencies, and Native Americans to protect cultural resources. It is the first non-professional organization to have received the Society for California Archaeology’s prestigious Helen C. Smith award for contributions to California archaeology.
Masks are encouraged.
For more information go to www.sierrarockart.com or contact Jane Punneo York at sierrariverrock@gmail.com.