‘Traditional’ methods of recording carved stones, including textual description, sketches, metric drawing and photography, have been in place since the end of the 19th century and remain of tremendous value today. (For discussion of drawing of early medieval see Ritchie 1997; 1998; Scott 1997; for comments on Romilly Allen’s pioneering use of photography, see 1993a). The advent of digital recording technologies has augmented but not replaced these established methods which retain value, as demonstrated by a comparative study of metric drawing and digital scanning to record prehistoric rock carving at Ballochmyle, which vindicated the analytic value of metric drawing (see Metric drawing: Case Study 31; Ballochmyle: Case Study 24).
Technological and economic constraints on the reproduction of images—which limited the number of images taken and presented, and the use of colour—have to a large extent been overcome by advances in digital printing and dissemination via the web. Black and white photography retains value due to the legibility of monochrome images of carved stone, and should not be set aside despite the ease and affordability of colour photography. Techniques of oblique-flash photography were developed in the 1970s and 1980s by RCAHMS photographers (Figure 11) and by Tom Gray (Scott 1997) and produced striking images and highly legible images of often worn carving (Figure 74). These are relatively low-tech and accessible to non-specialists and for this reason retain value, despite the superior facility of digital visualization methods to vary the position and nature of light sources ‘virtually’ after capture.
Archival photographs may have been shaped by artistic/aesthetic considerations (e.g. composition, lack of indication of scale, focus on carved surfaces), commercial potential (e.g. postcards and other material directed at the tourist market), or been driven by the desire to test new technology rather than simply record. Nonetheless they are of considerable value in reconstructing the biographies of stones, of gauging weathering and other damage, and of documenting the changing context of stones, especially their movement around and between sites. To a large extent this is also true of sketches, painting and etchings, if due allowance is made for ‘artistic licence’. Maps and plans of diverse types and various scales are an important source of information about the location (and movement) of stones within sites and landscapes, both directly and indirectly via stone-related place-names.
In addition to these non-contact methods, various contact methods of recording were developed or exploited in the 19th century. Conservation practice today would be to avoid potentially damaging contact methods, especially given the availability of non-contact digital techniques. However, these are expensive and require special equipment and technical knowledge. The low-tech alternative of a rubbing made with pencil or wax on paper may have a place in recording when carved surfaces are robust (Figure 75). Paper squeezes were popular in classical epigraphy, especially before the advent of cheap photography, and have occasionally been used in Scotland, despite less conducive weather conditions. Properly stored, paper squeezes are a durable 3D record of stone which would be suitable for digital scanning. Historic (i.e. 19th-century) squeezes might be of use for determining rates of weathering where recent scans are also available. The same applies to plaster casts and other replicas made by creating moulds from the stones, which in Scotland became popular from the second half of the 19th century. The value of these early replications technologies is now being recognised (Foster 2013a; Foster and Curtis 2016). Squeezes and replicas may be the only record we have of the nature, form and materiality of a lost stone. While any contact recording method has conservation implications which mean it is not to be undertaken unnecessarily or without professional guidance, the low-tech/low-cost nature of rubbings and photographs provides opportunities for community engagement and crowd-sourcing of data which are harder to achieve with more specialist recording technologies.
