Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Stephens.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project examines the influence of landscape in distinguishing rock art traditions within the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, with a focus on the Dinwoody and Outline Pecked and Incised styles. Instead of analyzing the art itself, this study investigates the spatial distribution and environmental contexts of rock art sites to discern whether cultural and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Radchenko.

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As complex archaeological phenomena, rock art images are entangled in numerous relationships of different types, including landscapes, waterways, flora and fauna, past communities, and non-human beings. With the rise of post-anthropocentric archaeologies and the rapid development of rock art research tools throughout the last two decades, our studies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Shirilla.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around the world, rock art sites present significant preservation challenges due to their vulnerability to deterioration from natural weathering as well as human impacts. Various forms of digital recordation are frequently presented as a means to preserve rock art images at various sites. The goal is to preserve them as they are before they disappear...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Schaefer. Stephen Alvarez. Alan Cressler. Jan Simek.

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. In recent years, rock art researchers have adopted a variety of automated methods that classify rock art images from high-resolution photographs and 3D models. These methods not only aid in the documentation of rock art, but can also assist with interpreting complex panels with multiple types of images...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramón Fábregas Valcarce. Arturo de Lombera-Hermida. Marcos Garcia-Diez. Xose Pedro Rodriguez. Ramon Viñas.

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. The Franco-Cantabrian group of cave art ranks among the best known examples of Paleolithic symbolic behavior. For more than a century no decorated cave was reported beyond the Nalón Valley in the center of Asturias, until the carvings and paintings from Cova Eirós were discovered. At more than 100 km from the Nalón,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Landscapes are cultural constructs, shaped by cognition and actualized in behavior. Hunter-gatherer landscapes are traditionally viewed in two terms: settlement patterns and systems, and related adaptive/subsistence niches and patches. While useful, these approaches embody the epistemological imperialism of Western...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Boyd. Phil Dering. Diana Radillo Rolón. Paul Schottmueller.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherer artists of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas produced Pecos River style (PRS) rock art as early as 5,500 years ago. In 2016, Boyd identified patterns in PRS murals similar to the mythologies of the ancient Nahua (Aztec) and the present-day Huichol (Wixárika). She advanced the hypothesis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Radillo Rolón. Carolyn Boyd. Siobhan Anderson. David Keim.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Origins and Tenacity of Myth is a comprehensive study of Pecos River style (PRS) pictographs in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is a collaborative project between Texas State University and Shumla Archaeological Center. This presentation addresses the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Huang.

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. Chaco Canyon contains multitudes of petroglyphs and pictographs, yet rock art has not been a prevalent line of evidence in the archaeological study of that pre-contact culture. More than 15,000 Ancestral Puebloan elements attest to the importance of the role of iconography within the canyon. And the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Crandall. Timothy Galowicz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster summarizes several years of investigations into painted rock representation and its social context within the Utcubamba Basin, Amazonas, Eastern Peru. This poster has three aims. The first, to provide an overview of the Utcubamba basin’s forms of painted rock representation. This is significant to a broader history of the region as there are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vladimir Levchenko.

This is an abstract from the "New approaches to the intractable problem of dating rock art" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> ¹⁴C AMS allowed targeting oxalates growing on rocks (mainly whewellite and weddellite) as potential dating material for rock art. Studies have confirmed that carbon in oxalate crusts comes not from the substrate on which they grow, but most probably originate from microbiota on surfaces. Additionally,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josephine McDonald.

This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lincoln County Rock Art Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) Inventory Project in Nevada focused on the rock art from the Mount Irish, Shooting Gallery and Pahroc ACECs. All three of these areas form part of a distinctive style region within the Great Basin. This is defined by the presence of the Patterned Bodied and Solid Bodied Figures which were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Busby.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A compositional analysis of pictographs of the Lower Pecos (LP) Canyonlands, located in Southwest Texas and Northern Mexico is presented. The complex systems utilized by LP artists in their painting process are examined, including symmetrical organization of forms and intentional arrangements of figures in a scene (typically a portion of the site). A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig. Victoria Roberts. Jerod Roberts.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rock imagery of Eagle Nest Canyon (ENC) is well known to many archaeologists and canyon visitors, especially at three sites: Eagle Cave, Kelley Cave, and Skiles Shelter. However, six additional rock imagery sites within ENC and adjacent tributaries are infrequently visited but still provide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Watts.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While recent scholarship has fruitfully considered the importance of Indigenous ontological commitments (e.g., to power and place) in the creation of rock art, notions of presence as a discrete component of an image’s being remain underexplored. In this contribution, I seek to examine these notions as distinct from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Quintela.

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. Across Petrified Forest National Park, ancestral Puebloans left their mark on the landscape through the creation of thousands of petroglyph panels. While the exact meaning behind the glyphs depicted in petroglyph panels has been blurred by the passage of time and poses a formidable interpretive challenge to archaeologists, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meinrat Andreae.

This is an abstract from the "New approaches to the intractable problem of dating rock art" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Petroglyphs are often created by removing the dark rock varnish that covers rock surfaces in arid and semiarid regions. Subsequently, the varnish redevelops over time. We have developed a non-destructive in-situ technique, using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), for the measurement of the areal density of Mn and Fe on rock...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Zborover. Alex Badillo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With over 1,000 individual pictorial elements, Chillihuay is among the largest and most impressive concentration of petroglyphs in southern Peru. Carved on geologically distinct rock outcrops high above the Chorunga Valley, these anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, abstract, and geometrical designs were distributed along narrow trails and hard-to-reach canyons...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig.

This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Petroglyphs have been an understudied form of rock art in the Lower Pecos canyonlands of Texas, in large part due to the small number of sites known to include carved, incised, or pecked designs. The most famous petroglyph site in the region is Lewis Canyon, where over 1,000 figurative petroglyphs were pecked into the limestone bedrock. Aside from Lewis Canyon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giles Spence-Morrow. Stephen Berquist.

This is an abstract from the "Wari and the Far Peruvian South Coast: Final Results of Excavations in Quilcapampa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Quilcapampa la Antigua is hypothesized by Jennings et al. (in press) to be a "moving place", strongly associated with roads leading up out of the valley bottom onto the pampa above. As the roads near the site, they pass beneath white sandstone cliffs. The visually striking cliff face is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryn Tapper.

Ongoing investigation of the Algonquian rock art of the Canadian Maritimes reveals that while some sites, such as Kejimkujik Lake, are well documented as a result of longstanding conservation strategies, these and other petroglyph sites have yet to be adequately and comprehensively framed within their archaeological, ethnohistorical and ethnographic contexts. Combining a landscape archaeology approach with theoretical positions emerging from the ‘ontological turn’ in archaeology, my research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Gutoski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I have been searching for the photographs and tracings made by J. Louis Giddings in June 1940 as reported in American Antiquity, Vol. 7, No. 1 (July 1941), at pp. 69-70 since I was an undergraduate in anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in 1992. When entering the program for my masters degree in the 2000's I had to content myself that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lenville Stelle.

The pictographs of the Bloodvein River, Artery Lake, Ontario offer an important view of rock art design and purpose during the late prehistoric period and perhaps continuing well into the nineteenth century. All images are finger applied and utilize iron oxide based pigment. The sites appear to be of varying function. The largest and most complex consists of seven or eight panels and may reveal a narrative of healing associated with the Fourth Degree of the Midewiwin or Ojibwe Grand Medicine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linea Sundstrom.

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. Infrared, ultraviolet, and D-Stretch imaging has provided a more complete view of a complex set of black and red painted rock from the southern Black Hills of South Dakota. The painted designs include bison, bears, other quadrupeds, humans, net-, web-, and gridlike figures, atlatl darts, hand- and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig. Karen Steelman. Marvin Rowe.

Painted pebbles are the primary mobiliary art found in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico. Previous studies of these artifacts have focused on stylistic variation of the imagery and interpretation of the role these artifacts played within Lower Pecos societies. The focus of this study is the use of portable X-ray fluorescence on Lower Pecos painted pebbles to conduct elemental analyses, providing insight into the chaîne opératoire of painted pebble production....