Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Ligman. Tina Hart. Michael Terlep.

Although portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) has routinely been used successfully to identify the geochemical source of lithic materials across North America, comparatively few studies apply pXRF to compositional and geochemical sourcing studies of rock art pigments. Logan Simpson conducted exploratory in situ analyses using non-invasive pXRF to analyze the elemental composition of manufactured rock art pigments used to produce prehistoric pictographs at several rock art sites across the Great...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suramya Bansal.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research experimentally investigates and theoretically situates the distinct impression and expression of hand imprints (prints and stencils) in rock art studies. This hominin act of imprinting hands, which cuts across spatial and temporal boundaries, showcases essential behavioural and cognitive characteristics. The various intricacies involved in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kay Scaramelli.

This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interpretation of rock art is fraught with difficulties, even when images may appear to be easily identified with cultural objects or elements found in nature. When considering the possible meaning of images of animals, plants, and artifacts depicted in the rock paintings and petroglyphs in the Middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eli Dollarhide.

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. Rock art is one of the most ubiquitous archaeological features in southeastern Arabia, yet it remains one of the most poorly understood aspects of the region’s prehistory. Re-occurring motifs of people, weapons, camels, horses, and other animal figures appear in similar forms across the UAE and Oman, and many were produced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Ryan. Elsa Cencig. Susan Lofthouse. Tommy Weetaluktuk.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, the Canadian government nominated eight places as candidates for future designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. One of those is Qajartalik, located off the coast of Nunavik, where more than 180 anthropomorphic faces were carved into soapstone outcrops between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst.

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent calls to understand our human experience in relation to the experiences of other than human kin not only have significant implications for how archaeologists understand the past but also for how archaeologists incorporate Indigenous framings of relating to the cosmos in a culturally holistic sense. In this paper, I will explore how the Northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig. Larry Loendorf. Julie Francis.

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. Greybull South (48BH92) is a rock art site located along the east bank of the Bighorn River near Greybull, Wyoming. The site was first documented in 1951 as part of the Yellowtail Reservoir survey project, but the site gained regional notoriety in 1962 when large blocks containing petroglyphs were removed...

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 Zachary Day.

This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research and Analysis Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art documentation strategies often focus on extracting individual panels out from the whole of a rock art site to photograph, document, and study the site. This approach has provided the majority of rock art site documentation on Bureau of Land Management public...

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 Mirte Korpershoek.

This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research and Analysis Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art research has traditionally focused on the identification and interpretation of motifs, both representative and non-representative. In recent times, scholars have increasingly started to investigate how rock art can inform on the environmental history of the...

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 Judith Trujillo.

This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research and Analysis Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation shows an initial approach to rock art landscapes in Nuevo Tolima, Serranía of La Lindosa, based on a systematic study of rock paintings. The analysis supposes that multiple human activities left traces currently visible in the rock art landscapes...

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...