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Photographs in this collection have been produced by Kathleen Markham, Daniela Alaniz-Roux, Allison Barden, and Connor Rowe at request of UC Berkeley Anthropology 136k class, for the purposes of digitally documenting the cultural heritage of Alcatraz Island with intent to gain greater insight into the island’s cultural history through the use of photographic technology.

 

Photographs in this collection were captured on Friday April 8, 2011, between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM Pacific Time, under sunny and windy conditions. Canon DSLR XTI, CanonT2i, Canon S95, and a Sony Cybershot. Lenses used with the Canon T2i include a Macro 60mm and Telephoto 70-200 lens, as well as its included kit 18-55mm lens. A 17-85mm lens was used with the Canon XTI. A tripod was used for macro, telephoto, HDR, and photogrammetry shots. The photos were post-processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.

 

Description written by Kathleen Markham, following Alonso C. Addison’s proposed virtual heritage metadata format in his chapter "The Vanishing Virtual" in New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage, edited by Kalay, et al., and published by Routledge in 2007.

 

Alcatraz Island (37.826667°N 122.423333°W), located in the San Francisco Bay, is a cultural heritage site constituting a part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) under the management of the National Park Service. The park is currently open to visitors by way of privately operated ferries, yet the recorded history of island begins with the founding of a United States Military fort and Military prison in 1850. Previous to the military garrisoning of the island the site had been used by Native American tribes, but the U.S. Military’s stronghold on the island continued until 1934 when the fort was refurbished to become a maximum security Federal Penitentiary. During Alcatraz’s time as a federal prison the island became home to many infamous criminals and functioned as the stage for multiple riots and escape attempts. Due to the challenges posed by running a maximum security prison on the island, the Federal Bureau of Prisons deemed the penitentiary too expensive to fund and consequently the prison was shut down in 1963. After lying vacant for years the land was unofficially reclaimed by Native American Indians of various tribes on November 20, 1969 with the justification that the Treaty of Fort Laramie established in 1868 entitling Native peoples to any unused surplus federal property. The Indian occupation of the Island continued into 1971 until the feasibility of the occupation waned due in part to the difficulty of continuing a steady flow of supplies to the island. After nineteen months of residing in the island, the occupiers were forcibly removed by government officials on June 11, 1971. The island’s notorious history began to draw in tourism in 1973, and in 1976 Alcatraz Island was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its long and varied history. The park has continued to draw visitors over the last four decades and is recognized as one of richest sites of cultural heritage in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

All photos Copyright ©2011 Center for Digital Archaeology, Berkeley CA Creative Commons creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

 

For more information contact Center for Digital Archaeology, Berkeley, CA, 94720 or visit www.codifi.info/licensing

 

For more facts and information about Alcatraz, please visit www.nps.gov/alca/index.htm.

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