Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Carpio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Known as "The Red Devil" or the "Muñeco", a rock painting in Olmec style, located in the municipality of Amatitlán, department of Guatemala. This was reported at the end of the 70s of the last century and has been visited on numerous occasions by various specialists. In this paper we will present a synthesis of its discovery and the investigations carried out,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hoofprint markings are a widespread macro tradition across the Plains and Great Lakes region but their relationship to elk imagery has not been fully explored. Along those lines, limited research has been done on what is known of track grooves or rock art imagery attributed to Indigenous women sharpening...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Olsen.

Petroglyphs and inscriptions have been investigated in the Arabian Peninsula at least since 1879, when Lady Anne and Wilfrid Blunt crossed the An Nafud desert and stopped at the now famous site of Jubbah in northern Saudi Arabia. Since that time explorers from England, Belgium, Germany, the US, and the Saudi Department of Antiquities, have recorded images from north to south. Archival materials, including field notes, photographs and letters are available at various institutions, but there is no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerod Roberts. Victoria Roberts. Amanda M. Castañeda. Carolyn Boyd.

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas is home to over 350 identified rock art sites depicting multiple styles, complexity, and intricacy. In 2017, Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center launched the Alexandria Project, a three year mission to revisit each known rock art site in Val Verde County and perform baseline documentation, with the aim to answer overarching questions requiring a large and consistent dataset. Our documentation methods utilize Structure from Motion 3D...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Christie.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will demonstrate how cultural and chronological context for rock art images can be established using Polly Schaafsma’s Indian Rock Art of the Southwest book. I had photos of rock art from the Navajo Reservation I could not place in any tradition. Number one shows two dark red masked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Lindsay.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As California wildfires increase in intensity and frequency across the state, archaeologists and land managers work to update fire management strategies and reassess fire risks to sensitive cultural resources. Existing literature indicates that while some buried archaeological resources are fairly protected, rock art sites are particularly susceptible to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirk Astroth. T. J. Ferguson. Caitlin McPherson.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Meaning and function of rock art elements, especially when related to site location, have been discussed for years. Rock art can represent statements about group identity or social relationships and even demark boundaries or territories. Rock art is a visual legacy created to communicate and reaffirm...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Hsin-yee Huang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Finger flutings are lines and markings drawn with the human hand in soft sediments in caves and rock shelters throughout southern Australia, New Guinea, and southwestern Europe that date back to the Late Pleistocene. Over the last two decades, Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder developed a method to determine characteristics of the creators, such as age, sex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Devlin Gandy. David Robinson.

In rock art research the stratigraphy of a rock art panel can offer great insight into the temporality of a panel, which can then inform many other aspects of analytical inquiry. Yet, making the necessary distinctions between elements is often difficult--as images fade and are worn by time, or the subjective nuances of the recorder. This paper explores novel means of identifying, defining, and separating unique rock art elements in digital space within different digital methodologies.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Petrified Forest National Park" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Chaco Phenomenon remains a contentious and ever evolving paradigm of Southwest Archaeology. Key to understanding the nature of Chaco is the extent and purpose of the many outlying great house communities scattered across the northern Southwest. One of the farthest flung of these possible outliers is the Mac-Stod great house...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Stoll. George Stoll.

This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The painted parietal art of prehistoric San Bushmen of southern Africa has been in the public eye since the 1920s. Iconographic and stylistic differences within the San artistic corpus have been attributed to distinctions of time and space within and among the many centers of image concentration. Rock art found in the ravines...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven James.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hawaiian Islands have a variety of rock art sites I have examined and photographed on five of the eight main islands over the past 50 years, with most of the research conducted more recently as summarized in this presentation. Some islands have only a few petroglyph locations, whereas the Big Island...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst.

This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, researchers have interpreted rock art based on ethno-historical accounts of ceremonies as male-created and male-oriented experiences and spaces. This has led to researchers ignoring traditional women’s roles in the creation of rock art as well as women’s interaction with rock art spaces. I examine how Lakota women...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Lindsay. Timothy Murphy.

The Honda Ridge pictograph panel contains highly stratified elements painted on a smooth, reflective surface, offering a unique opportunity to explore prehistoric rock art production. We adapted non-invasive, digital microscopy methods from the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center to apply stratigraphic analysis within a 1m x 1m section of this superimposed, monochromatic panel. The reflective host rock preserves observable characteristics of prehistoric painting techniques, from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenny Ni.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Survey in the Rio Grande Gorge of New Mexico over the past decade has revealed a robust corpus of Plains Biographic rock art depicting the coups and accomplishments of human warriors. While horses are equally present, most of them are secondary to the narratives depicted and appear as ridden mounts or captured wealth. However, an unusual panel found in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John W. Greer. Mavis Greer.

This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Keyser’s interest in horse styles in rock art of the Northwestern Plains has expanded our knowledge and ways of thinking about this image. His recent work to quantify differences in Crow and Blackfoot horses has led to identifying infusions of each group into the other’s territory. However, his identification system has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This study examines the spatial patterning of shield iconography at late Pueblo III sites (A.D. 1250-1300) in the Tsegi Canyon system, as an indicator of shared group identity. In the mid-13th century, the Tsegi Canyon region of northeastern Arizona followed a greater regional trend of communities coalescing into defensive high canyon alcoves, accompanied by the adoption of shield iconography, likely influenced by Freemont traditions to the north. These images are variously interpreted to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Alberti.

This is an abstract from the "Northern Rio Grande History: Routes and Roots" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaic foragers represent one extreme of the relationship between routes and roots. There is a wealth of evidence in the US Southwest of the itinerant, ambulatory lifeways of ancient populations—impermanent campsites, lithic scatters near likely animal trails and watering holes, and the enigmatic rock art that appears along watercourses or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liv Winnicki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Commonly across the Puebloan Southwest, incised lines are observed adjacent to petroglyph panels. Often, these features are simply labeled as “axe sharpening grooves.” Many archaeologists label them in their site forms as such, tally them, and tend to not interpret them further. In this experimental research, I push back on this over simplified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley. Tony Quach.

Yokuts ethnography indicates that pictograph sites passed from father to son to grandson within shamanic lineages, suggesting episodic painting at these locations. This practice is archaeologically supported by motif superimpositions and minor stylistic differences at sites. An in-situ pXRF study of red motifs was conducted at site CA-TUL-2871, Springville, CA, in the hopes of analytically distinguishing painting episodes, based on the assumption that chemically dissimilar pigments may have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Krantz.

This paper examines what might be called the "palimpsest panel" rock art tradition of the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. Palimpsest panels are rock faces with petroglyphs that have accrued in a layered fashion through time. Prior research into such panels has typically focused on questions of chronology, each layer representing a distinct culture-historical era of iconographic production or a chapter in a linear chronology. Here, however, I move away from the traditional chronological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uri Berger. Gonen Sharon.

Excavation in the Shamir Dolmen Field (comprising over 400 dolmens), on the northern Israeli basaltic terrains, was carried out following the discovery of enigmatic rock art engravings on the ceiling of one of the largest dolmens ever recorded in the Levant. Excavation of this dolmen, covered by a basalt capstone weighing some 50 tons, revealed a secondary multi-burial (of both adults and children) rarely described in a dolmen context in Israel. Engraved into the rock ceiling above the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Bies.

This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin is one of the areas where Dr. Larry Loendorf has worked for years. This paper talks about a new rock art site in north-central portion of the Big Horn Basin. In 2015 two ranch women Lynette Kelley Cook and Phyllis Preator contacted the author about rock art in the northern Bighorn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robyn Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A number of sizable rock art sites occur along the ephemeral drainages of the Bennett Hills located in the Snake River Plain of south central Idaho. The Bennett Hills are a range of tangled ridges, canyons and drainages that trend east-west for over 60 miles. This poster session will highlight four of those rock art sites (Thorn Creek, Grasshopper Cave, Hidden...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ure.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. LiDAR scanning and photogrammetry are quickly becoming extremely useful tools for archaeologists. This is especially the case for documenting complex rock art panels that can be difficult to fully represent using traditional techniques constrained to 2D formats. In contrast, terrestrial LiDAR and photogrammetry provide a...