Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Farmer.

The Barrier Canyon Style (aka. Barrier Canyon Anthropomorphic Style) is widely regarded as one of the more prominent and significant pictographic rock art styles in North America, and the Great Gallery from Horseshoe Canyon in Utah has long been recognized as both the type-site and arguably most prominent and complex of all Barrier Canyon Style sites. It is also the most overly exploited and often visually abused site in popular visual culture. Beyond scholarly reproduction, images of the Great...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Bies. Linea Sundstrom.

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. Jim Keyser has been a key figure in recording and interpreting rock art in Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota for many years. This paper highlights some of his many contributions in understanding Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric narrative rock art. Jim has expanded his impact on the field of rock art research by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liam Brady. Sally May. Joakim Goldhahn.

Over the last decade, a major challenge for archaeologists has focused on understanding the relationship between people, things and the sea. As part of this effort archaeologists have increasingly focused their attention towards rock art as a symbolic means to referencing a maritime identity. At one level, identifying this connection can be relatively straightforward via marine-themed imagery (e.g. watercraft, marine animals) but what else can we draw upon to understand the nature and depth of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin O'Briant.

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. When confronted with apparently non-representational forms at prehistoric rock art sites, North American researchers tend to categorize such imagery as abstract symbols, shamanic art, or entoptic phenomena. Drawing on research in the field of historical geography and utilizing a direct-historical,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cayla Kennedy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in Utah’s northern Uinta Basin, the Cub Creek area of Dinosaur National Monument contains examples of Fremont pithouses, upland roasting features, diverse artifact assemblages, and panels of Classic-Vernal-style Fremont rock art. The Classic Vernal rock art style is characterized by geometric patterns, animals, and heavily stylized anthropomorphic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Roberts. Jerod Roberts. Charles Koenig. Karen Steelman.

For over twenty years, Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center has studied and promoted the preservation of rock art in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands along the U.S.-Mexico border. In July 2017, Shumla launched the three-year Alexandria Project designed to gather an extensive dataset from over 350 known rock art sites in Val Verde County, where the majority of US sites are located. Research questions driving data collection reflect two main aspects: geospatial distribution and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Haynes. Megan Stueve. David Page. Lisa Cipolla.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fort Hunter Liggett (FHL), in the central coastal region of California, contains a prodigious rock art record composed primarily of hundreds of red, black, and white pictographs. Most people familiar with this rock art know of the National Register-listed La Cueva Pintada, a large cave with several hundred overlapping elements, but there are also other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Kortum. William Fitzhugh.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ongoing Khoton Lake project documents several hundred archaeological sites and environmental conditions spanning the past 8,000 years. Forty excavated sites ranging from pre-Neolithic to the Bronze, Iron, Turkic, and medieval periods occur as dwellings, ritual, mortuary, ceremonial, and special-purpose places. In many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olivia Kindl. Alma Noemi Vega Barbosa.

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some features of a rocky site in the Potosino semi-desert of north-central Mexico will be presented, where an ancient rock world and ritual expressions of contemporary ethnic groups, in particular the Wixarika (Huichol Indians), coincide. For the latter, the site is an important step in their ritual journey to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Stagg. Jason Toohey.

Numerous rock art panels dot the landscape of the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-AD 1450) site of Callacpuma in the Cajamarca Basin of northern Peru. The panels are comprised of many distinct motifs and types including a variety of camelids, anthropomorphs, geometric patterns and other zoomorphs. Although the iconographic information held within these motifs is certainly important, this project attempts to move beyond the iconographic significance of individual motifs or panels and examine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roxanne Tsang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art and its ethnographic study provide important insights to understand people’s connection to place. In this research, formal and informed methods were used to analyze four stenciled rock art sites in Auwim village, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). One thousand and seventy-seven rock art motifs were identified while the ethnographic data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Hayward. Jonathan Hanna. Michael Jessamy. Donald Smith. Michael Cinquino.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art locations in the Caribbean are well known and include caves, waterways, coasts, inland rock formations, and ceremonial enclosures. Mythological (caves as centers of origin and fertility) and practical considerations (guardians of fresh water sources) have been offered as general explanations for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beatriz Menéndez Iglesias. Pavel Ulianov Martínez-Pabello. Guillermo Acosta Ochoa. Sergey Sedov. Patricia Pérez-Martínez.

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. Sonora has a great concentration of rock art in North America. In order to advance in the analysis and documentation of the rock art groups, the project “Cave Documentation and Patina Study in Northern Sonora” was proposed, focused on Cucurpe (Sierra Madre Occidental) and Caborca (Sonoran Desert). The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melinda Leach.

Prehistoric rock art increasingly is understood to be embedded in complex cultural systems of social routines, kin networks, economic landscapes, technological change, seasonal population movements, domestic and task-specific foraging behaviors, and variable gendered activities. The Holocene record of occupation and use of the High Rock Country in the Northern Great Basin provides an opportunity to explore such complex contexts of rock art. Rich lithic sources, strategic locations for hunting,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bong Kang.

Many aquatic animals, such as whales, sea lions and turtles, and terrestrial animals, such as tigers, wild cats, deer, boars, and weasels, were identified on the rock art of Bangudae, located in the southeastern part of Korean peninsula. Scenes of human figures, whale hunting, boats, and net and fence hunting are also present. Some western archaeologists are suspicious about whale hunting conducted by prehistoric Korean people. They argue that there are not clear depictions at Bangudae of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gordon Ambrosino.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Fortaleza Ignimbrite (FI) is a geologic formation, situated at the headwaters of the Fortaleza and Santa Rivers in highland Ancash Peru. A 2014 survey of the FI by the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica Arte Rupestre del Alto Fortaleza (PIA ARAF) documented 192 rock art places on the FI, demonstrating correlations between specific images and production...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dagmara Zawadzka.

Unlike most material culture, rock art is firmly embedded in its place. This particular circumstance has shaped its research, as well as its reception among the general public. While famous sites, such as Lascaux, are well known and recognised despite difficulty in accessing them, other sites, especially those in Canada, are still relatively unknown. This paper will briefly address how rock art has been consumed and presented to the general public within Canada. Next, I will address how this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pawel Polkowski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated some 350 km from the Nile Valley, Dakhleh Oasis is considered one of the largest rock art complexes in Egypt. The petroglyphs found there were executed in various periods, beginning from the Early Holocene, through Pharaonic times, towards modernity. Often being located in the same areas, they constitute large palimpsests witnessing a long history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathalie Brusgaard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late 1st millennium BC and the early 1st millennium AD, nomadic groups inhabited the Black Desert of northern Arabia. These desert societies are elusive, having left behind few material remains and archaeological research having been scarce. What we know about them has been based almost solely on the inscriptions they carved into the basalt rocks. Yet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Alberti.

Archaic rock art in the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico demonstrates an intimacy with the ecologies of which it is a part, from the microscopic life with which it shares its surfaces, to the talus slopes it occupies or watches over. Knowledge of materials and the ecological processes with which they were thoroughly entangled encouraged hunters to lay down tracks and traces of their own, including the geometric patterns and animal and bird prints that constitute the archaic rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sally May. Joakim Goldhahn. Gabriel Maralngurra.

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. In recent decades, studies of contact rock art have significantly contributed to rock art research globally. A key reason for this is that such artworks can represent a reverse gaze across cross-cultural encounters. Another reason is that contact rock art affords us neatly chronological points of time, before and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radoslaw Palonka. Aaron Wright. Katarzyna Ciomek.

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. How we frame the study of rock imagery (i.e., petroglyphs and pictographs) conditions the types of questions we ask, the types of data we employ, and ultimately the types of conclusions we draw. In the North American Southwest, the study of rock imagery has long focused on the images, less so on the rocks, and only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolina Guedes.

A new project carried out in the region of the Rio Vermelho / São Lourenço river basin in the central-western region of Brazil started in 2016. This project focus on the studies of the initial stages of the establishment of the hunters gathers groups in this region. It is intended through excavations, surveys and research in rock art to show patterns of the peoples who inhabited that region. The first systematic field surveys within this project, entitled "Archeology in the Pantanal region"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan. Ramón Fábregas Valcarce.

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. Polly Schaafsma has often emphasized the use of ethnographic analogy to get insights into the use and ideological framework of ancient pictographs. While this is both feasible and reasonable in Southwestern rock art, the numerous petroglyphs known in the Galician region mainly belong to a period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Don Hann.

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. American Indian peoples of the Columbia Plateau have engaged with numerous scholars and others since the mid-nineteenth century to document many aspects of their traditional lifeways. The resulting documentary record has provided a gold mine for researchers studying the rock art of the region. Jim Keyser has been a...