petroglyph-gallery

FIRST MARKS 🪨

an open-air gallery of the world’s petroglyphs

The Great Hunt grove at dusk

A walkable three.js gallery at perpetual dusk. Twenty-one real petroglyphs — hand-redrawn stroke-by-stroke as thousands of peck marks, at (or near) published scale — stand on procedurally shaped boulders in six regional groves, each with a brass gallery sconce and a fact-checked museum label whose sources are clickable. A seventh grove, Field Notes, holds two panels the curator encountered in person in the Vermilion Cliffs of Arizona, with her field photographs framed beside them.

At the center: a fire, log benches you can sit on, a pottery bar pouring five archaeologically attested drinks (9,000-year-old Jiahu rice-honey wine, Chaco canyon cacao, chicha de jora, pulque, Wari chicha de molle), and a table of founding foods with info cards. The score — wooden flute, wind, crickets, fire — is generated live in WebAudio. Nothing is sampled, no asset files exist: every texture is drawn in code, every sound synthesized, and the whole gallery ships as one self-contained HTML file.

Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/brezgis/petroglyph-gallery
cd petroglyph-gallery
npm install
npm run dev        # build + serve on http://localhost:8123

No build needed just to visit: open docs/index.html in any browser — that single file is the entire gallery. npm run dist regenerates it.

Controls

WASD + mouse to walk (Shift or double-tap W to run) · E read labels / take pottery / sip / sit by the fire · G set a vessel down · N dusk ⇄ night · M mute · Q performance mode · Esc frees the cursor.

Worth waiting for: the Sun Dagger returns to the Fajada spiral every few minutes, shooting stars only fall at night, and there are lizards.

The collection

North America — the Great Hunt (Nine Mile Canyon) · the Fajada Butte Sun Dagger spiral · Three Rivers · the Sand Island flute players
South America — the Toro Muerto dancers · the Atacama llama caravan · the 42-metre serpent of the Orinoco
Europe — Tanum’s bronze ships · the Camunian Rose · Alta’s reindeer corral
Africa — the Dabous giraffes at their full 5.4 m · the Lion Man of Twyfelfontein · the Ice Age aurochs of Qurta
Asia — Tamgaly’s sun-headed beings · Gobustan’s reed boats · the Bangudae whale hunt
Oceania — the Murujuga thylacine · the Emu in the Sky, underfoot · the birdmen of Orongo
Field Notes — the Maze Rock Art Site & an unrecorded herd, Vermilion Cliffs, Arizona

Honesty & ethics

The engravings are respectful hand redrawings after the originals — not tracings — with sources on every lectern (UNESCO listings, NPS/BLM pages, journal DOIs; every label was fact-checked and every link fetch-verified). The originals belong to their landscapes and to the living peoples whose heritage they are. The location of the one formally unrecorded panel is deliberately withheld, per rock-art ethics. If you ever stand before the real thing: never touch, chalk, or make rubbings.

Tech notes

Plain JavaScript + three.js, bundled with esbuild. Terrain, sky, boulders, pottery and ground are procedural (fBm value noise + canvas textures); petroglyphs render as thousands of jittered peck-dots along authored polylines, embossed into normal maps so the sconce light catches the grooves. Performance architecture: only the 6 nearest sconce spotlights are live lights (constant count → no shader rebuilds), shadows re-bake only while the light moves, resolution adapts to frame time, and raycasts hit invisible proxy boxes. Grass/terrain techniques after al-ro and the Codrops grass tutorial.

Built by Claude, with full creative control, for Anna — who then walked into the desert and brought back two more stones.