Rubbings, Sketches & Their Associated Problems

Carvings in stone are tricky to record: sometimes they are so fine as to be nearly invisible; occasionally, they are damaged or worn to an extent which obscures them; they can be located in places of difficult access. Nowadays there are digital electronic means of pinning down the information contained on a slab of rock, or etched into a wall: topographical laser scanning, or high-definition digital photography for example. In eras passed, researchers depended upon the work of trained artists to record images and text, or they produced rubbings.

Rubbings are made by covering an incised or raised text with a sheet of paper and then rubbing across the paper’s surface with charcoal, or graphite, in order to leave an impression of the carvings beneath. In essence, this provides the researcher with a quick copy of the piece and provides good information in terms of the dimensions and shape of the work; a downside of the process is that irregularities of the stone or other material, which would otherwise be unseen, are also highlighted and may be read into the text as part of the design. The reduction of the carving to a monochrome format has similar results.

Sketching the text, bringing in the skills of a trained artist, would seem to be an improvement over this process. With the correct implements and techniques, the basic elements of the design can be maintained, such as size, layout and proportion. The downside is that the information necessarily passes through an interpretive state by being relayed through the artist; even the best artist can make assumptions about an image that will damage elements causing confusion in the final analysis. As well, artists can take shortcuts in an attempt to complete work in a pressured timeframe; they may well gloss over details deemed to be irrelevant; or leave sketches unfinished to be completed later back at camp or the studio, with the essential loss of accuracy that an imperfect memory dictates.

As an example take these three images: the first is a kangaroo taken from a catalogue of the Museum compiled in the late 1700s by Sir Ashton Lever. No-one in their right mind would call this an accurate representation: the creatures are too spindly and rat-like; there has been too much attention paid to the forearms and the anatomy of the leg on the main animal; and that whimsical little hunting scene in the background is just too fantastic.

The next image is a coloured engraving from a catalogue of the world’s peoples, dating from the early Nineteenth Century. This image purports to be of a family of Indians from the Arctic regions of North America, and I’m sure all such people of the time were this ruddily complected and European-looking!

The final image is taken from French wallpaper manufactured in 1805, showing a scene of a typical Hawaiian cultural activity. Hawaiian? It could be Ancient Greek; it could be a fancy dress ball imagined from a Jane Austen novel. The point is, accuracy has left the building. It's at these points during gameplay that the Keeper needs to remember to call for Art, Craft and Archaeology skill checks.

So, in the final analysis, modern recording techniques would seem to be the best. At first glance this would seem to be the case, but everything becomes less than perfect when the Mythos becomes involved. An extremely dangerous Mythos text can affect and distort any attempt to pin it down. Equipment may fail, batteries can drain of power, memory cards and flash drives wipe themselves clean. In the past, attempts to store some Mythos texts in electronic formats have caused server fires, de-gaussing of hard-drives and software corruption. It would seem that technology is no assurance of quality.

Investigators should be aware that any recording of an original Mythos source is going to be less than perfect. As with the recording of any Mythos material, each iteration, at every remove from the original source, becomes more error-ridden and fraught with danger. Keepers should construct the chains of their information with this thought in mind.