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{Wind}
[Narration] Just east of El Paso lies sacred ground. Hueco
Tanks. A state park with the history of humankind here for all to see. Ancient pictographs painted
on these rocks dating back hundreds if not thousands of years ago.
[Wanda Olszewski] There really is no other place like Hueco
Tanks in terms of the nature and the number of pictograph images and for a tiny place
of only eight hundred and sixty acres there’s just an amazing number of separate pictographs
sites
{Wind}
{Spray paint}
[Narration] Unfortunately vandals damaged several pictographs
with graffiti. The thought was they could never be restored back to their original glory.
That is until now.
{Computer bangs into rocks}
[Narration] Scientists have a theory and they are here
to put it to the test.
[Narration] This is the key to analyzing the graffiti
…a Raman spectrometer.
[Tom Tague] What we want to do is use the chemical information
to ablate off the H and C and not touch the yellow of the pictograph. And the chemical
information that we get from the Raman spectrometer allows us to do just that.
[Narration] Did you catch that? They can figure out what
the paints made out of with this machine. So later, they can use a laser to remove just
the paint and leave behind the original pictograph.
[Andrzej Dajnowski] We need to understand first what’s there
before we can address removal process. The removal process has to be safe and in order
to make sure that it is safe is to analyze what we have on the stone.
[Narration] To see the laser in action tune in to Texas
Parks and Wildlife Television the week of October 21-27, 2012.