Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marissa Molinar.

This presentation examines traditional, contemporary, and experimental methods of illustration and photography in rock art recording. Addressed accordingly are the processes and problems unique to pictographic (painted) and petroglyphic (pecked) parietal imagery, superimposition and dating. As a rock art researcher, photographer, and artist, many examples will be drawn from my fieldwork; specifically contemporary methods utilizing panoramic photography and an experimental photographic technique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marissa Molinar.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines traditional, contemporary, and experimental methods of illustration and photography in rock art recording. Addressed accordingly are the processes and problems unique to pictographs (painted) and petroglyphs (pecked) parietal imagery, superimposition and dating. As a rock art researcher, photographer, and artist, many examples will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chester Liwosz.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the first forays into the use of databases and computational analysis of rock art compositions by Leroi-Gourhan in the middle of the twentieth century, digital archaeology applications have boomed, becoming a virtual necessity in twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary computerized tools for managing “big-data”...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Robinson. Eleni Kotoula. Clare Bedford. Devlin Gandy. Matthew Baker.

The over-painting sequences at the elaborate rock-art site of Pleito, South-Central California, is one of most complex in the Americas. In a region famous for its polychromatic traditions, including Chumash, Yokuts, Kitanemuk, and other Californian native groups, Pleito stands out as the richest in terms of variety of colours, iconography, and over-painting. This over-painting, or superimposition, offers the 'deepest' data rich relative sequence in the region. Integrated work employing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Native peoples along the Pacific Coast of North America exploited stranded whales that washed ashore, providing abundant meat and oil for consumption. Many rock art sites along the coast between Alaska and Acapulco contain images of whales and other cetaceans, and portable effigies also depict these marine...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrzej Rozwadowski.

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. Southern Siberia is the home of unique images of shamans, some of which show specific associations with rock surface features, notably fissures. In my previous research, I analyzed one such image from the Minusinsk Basin; namely, from the site of Ilinskaya Pisanitsa (Cambridge Archaeological Journal 2017). In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mairead Doery.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "Tool grooves”, "incised lines" and “axe-sharpening marks” are some of the varying names used to describe linear rock modifications found across western North America. Previous ethnoarchaeological research has examined methods and motivations surrounding the creation of such markings, but consideration of their individual landscape contexts remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Solometo. Wesley Bernardini. Dalton Olson. David Biddle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shields and shield bearers are recurrent and widespread motifs in Pueblo IV (AD 1300-1540) rock art. Polly Schaafsma has argued that depictions of shields and shield bearers in the Rio Grande were part of an iconographic complex that expressed ideas about warfare and war ritual. When inscribed on the landscape, shields may have recalled actual warfare, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Hayward. Michael Cinquino. Frank Schieppati. Don Smith.

There is some suggestion in the literature, most explicitly developed by Espenshade (2014) for Puerto Rico, that major enclosures, particularly with rock art, at some point in their life cycle could be considered shrines or special religious places that increasingly attracted visitors or pilgrims from non-local on- and off-island locations. Pilgrimage rounds are well-established components of religious systems both past and current in various parts of world, including the incorporation of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenny Ni.

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. Survey in the Rio Grande Gorge of New Mexico over the past decade has revealed a robust corpus of rock art that depicts horses in the Plains Biographic tradition. Comparison of the Rio Grande Gorge horses to horses in Plains Biographic rock art of other regions and cultures may address questions of cultural affiliation, movement of people,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Huffman. Frank Lee Earley.

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. Abstract rock art formed part of a pilgrimage trail that led from the lower Apishapa Canyon to the Spanish Peaks near Trinidad, Colorado. Hunter/gatherer ethnography from the Great Basin makes sense of abstract engravings in the canyon at sites such as Cramer, Canterbury, and Snake Blakeslee. The Apishapa Canyon leads from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Montgomery.

Over the past century, a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to Plains horse culture, particularly focusing on how horses transformed the economic practices of nomadic people and the ecology of the Great Plains. As one of the most iconic equestrian cultures of the eighteenth century, the Comanche have been a common subject of these anthropological and historical investigations. Recent studies of the Comanche have focused on the role of horses in facilitating their rise from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Boyd.

Pecos River style rock art was produced in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico during the Archaic beginning around 2700 BC. This style is characterized by finely executed anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures arranged in highly-ordered, complex compositions. Pecos River style anthropomorphs are frequently portrayed with a series of dots emanating upwards from an open mouth. Zoomorphic figures of felines and deer are also represented with this pictographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Stagg. Jason Toohey.

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. Callacpuma is a multicomponent archaeological site in the Cajamarca Basin of the northern highlands of Peru with a long and complex history of human occupation spanning from at least 1000 BC to approximately AD 1500. An estimated 3,000-4,000 rock art panels dot the landscape of Callacpuma. Over the past three field seasons, 100...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bettina Schulz Paulsson.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sperm whales played a central role in the cosmological world view of early megalithic societies (4700-4200 cal BC) in the Bay of Morbihan, Brittany, France. The whales were engraved as iconic signs on colossal standing stones, some of which were re-used to build megalithic graves. The largest of these standing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Jalandoni.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art is under constant threat from natural and anthropogenic deterioration and one of the challenges for archaeologists is to document and study this invaluable heritage before it disappears. Digital archaeology, the use of information technology and digital media for archaeological research, is essential for recording, analyzing and envisioning rock...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chester Liwosz.

Recent systematic study of petroglyphs and pictographs at select sites in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert explores archaeoacoustic connections between rock art and oral tradition. This project illustrates data collection procedures which integrate emergent, non-impacting methods, with interpretation facilitated by post-positivist thought. Research design is nonetheless framed within the scientific method. Systematic experiments incorporated into this study explore the viability of, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Roberts. Kaylee Henderson. Jerod Roberts.

This is an abstract from the "Almost 100 Years since Julio C. Tello: Research at Huaca del Loro, Nasca, Peru" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the discovery of a Wari D-Shaped temple and other adjacent architectural structures in 2019, the 2022 field season at Huaca del Loro focused on excavation of the temple complex. Well preserved mud plaster still remained on many of the walls and floors of the structures. Examination of the walls in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Oosterwijk. Linda Hurcombe. José Iriarte.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experimental research holds great potential for answering questions about the materiality of rock art, revealing insights into the practice of creating images and what it can tell us about the people who produced them. At Cerro Azul in Amazonian Colombia, multi-disciplinary documentation methods revealed that hand depictions were created using a variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joakim Goldhahn.

This paper will explore the relationship between animated boat prows in different stone media - petroglyphs and geoglyphs - from an ontological perspective. It explores chronological changes in these media and argues for both similarities and differences in how stones participated in unfolding peoples' life-worlds or worldings during the north European Bronze Age.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Hsin-yee Huang. April Nowell. Leslie Van Gelder.

Finger flutings are lines and markings drawn with the human hand in soft cave sediment in caves and rock shelters throughout southern Australia, New Guinea and southwestern Europe, dating back to the Late Pleistocene. Two decades ago, Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder developed a rigorous methodological framework for the measurement and analysis of finger flutings that allows researchers to identify characteristics of the creators, such as age, sex and group sizes. However, despite a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Chacon.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper investigates the belief in Supernatural Gamekeepers/Animal Masters of wildlife in three South American indigenous societies: the Tukano of Colombia, the Embera of Colombia, and the Achuar of Ecuador. Findings show that Supernatural Gamekeepers/Animal Masters are believed to grant success to hunters who...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Mark.

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. Structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry models can be used to visualize petroglyphs that are otherwise difficult to see in photographs. Three techniques require a high-quality model that has captured the surface geometry in the point cloud and mesh. 1) Online and free software permit viewing a model surface with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox. Carolyn Boyd.

Four principal rules of interpretation for Pecos River Style rock art of the Lower Pecos region of Texas are proposed. These rules were proposed based on a commonality between Pecos River Style and the iconography of historic Corachol-Aztecan speaking tribes such as the sixteenth century Mexica of central Mexico and the present-day Huichol of western Mexico. This presentation shows how the same rules can be applied to the interpretation of the rock art of other prehistoric Corachol-Aztecan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Musser-Lopez.

Though routine interaction may not have been the case, the Fremont were a part of the iconic world of the Virgin (Anasazi) Puebloan people who occupied southeastern Nevada north of Las Vegas in Evergreen Flats, 75 miles northwest the Lower Colorado River’s north end bend. Within that region is Petroglyph Corral visually demonstrating Puebloan people at a Fremont fringe area where the two cultures may have competed, collided or even collapsed into one another and the more recent Numic tribes. ...