Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer. John W. Greer.

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. A small sandstone rockshelter overlooking Buffalo Creek in the southeastern foothills of the Bighorn Mountains has been of interest to researchers since the 1960s due to its shield-bearing warriors, but they account for only a few images at the site. Several different animals here include elk, bears, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Fernstrom.

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’s extraordinary body of rock art publications allows us to return repeatedly to the images to ask different questions as our knowledge expands. Rock art informs my studies of pre-European Native American murals and 3-dimensional human figures because murals are compositions on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Schaefer.

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent advances in 3D modeling have allowed archaeologists to explore cave art sites as dynamic spaces where perception and physical experience played active roles in the formation of said artwork. In the American Southeast, where caves were and still are seen by many Indigenous peoples as portals to another spiritual world, 3D reconstructions have much...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie Cobb. Manuel Duenas-Garcia. Waylon Coats. Miriam Campos Martinez. Scott Nicolay.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The preservation of cultural heritage through advanced technology allows us to understand and protect the past for future generations. This poster presents the Rock Art Heritage Preservation Project, a project aimed at digitally conserving the legacy of California Central Valley's rock art with the Southern Sierra Miwok Nation. California's landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer.

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. Central Wyoming is surrounded by distinctive rock art styles — Dinwoody to the west, Plains Ceremonial and Biographic to the east, and styles south into Colorado previously attributed to Fremont, Ute, and Comanche. Presence of these distinctive styles locally...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Berrier.

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. The Jornada Mogollon region is known for its rich body of rock art. Researchers have suggested that elements such as cloud terraces, masks, goggle-eyed figures, and horned serpents are associated with ceremony. Although hundreds of bighorn sheep images exist in the regional rock art these figures are not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador. Ofelia Márquez Huitzil.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper is dedicated to carrying out a detailed study of some of the reliefs that were carved on the slopes of Cerro Chalcatzingo, during the Middle Formative period, as well as to present some critical reflections about the interpretations that have been made by other authors. All descriptions imply interpretation, in consequence, every process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Ann Armitage.

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> Over the past ten years, extensive characterization of San rock art has been conducted, leading to the identification of a wide range of coloring materials. The black paintings are composed of four classes of carbon-based materials: soot, charcoal, carbon black, and burnt bones, providing a potential avenue for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Terlep.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers, most recently Crown and colleagues (2016), have long highlighted the significance of polydactyly (having more than five digits on a hand or foot) within rock imagery and material culture across Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures displaying polycephaly (multiple heads) is another frequent depiction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Terlep.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers, most recently Crown and colleagues (2016), have long highlighted the significance of polydactyly (having more than five digits on a hand or foot) within rock imagery and material culture across Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures displaying polycephaly (multiple heads) is another frequent depiction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Clayton.

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. The Volcanic Tableland in the Great Basin houses a rock art province with a wide array of archaeological sites created by First Nations peoples since the Late Pleistocene/Holocene transition. I look at how people in the past situated themselves in the landscape and structured their occupation patterns in the changing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Paint Rock, Texas (41CC1) is a 300 m. broken limestone bluff along the Concho River that contains dozens of spectacular solar interactions with rock art that was placed there over the course of two millennia. Through five years of observation, the members of the Paint Rock Project have recorded over fifty solar interactions that mark specific...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Macrae.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper briefly outlines the arguments and evidence for both the synchronic and diachronic production of Pecos River Style pictograph panels. New studies claim that Pecos River Style rock art sites are synchronically produced murals, painted in color order, composed in a single production episode. Conversely, my own research spanning two-decades has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Clark Wernecke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous publication has dealt with the discovery of incised stones at the Gault Archaeological Site and the artifacts of early Paleoindian age. To date, the project has identified 146 stones with incised lines and designs on them from provenienced collections, unprovenienced collections and collections in private hands. The artifacts are on both limestone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Fuld. Terry Ozbun.

Located on the northern fringe of the Great Basin, in Lake County, Oregon, the Glass Buttes volcanic complex is the most important obsidian toolstone source in North America. Glass Buttes obsidian is world renowned because it is colorful, abundant, available in large pieces, and of extremely high quality for making flaked stone tools. Throughout the late Pleistocene and Holocene, Native Americans have continuously used Glass Buttes obsidian, and it was widely traded in the Pacific Northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jo McDonald.

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. The developments of microscopy and in other scientific fields over the last five decades have changed the face of rock art research enabling researchers to make huge leaps and bounds in understanding early human art-making. Long term collaborations with Aboriginal communities in Australia have also allowed for continuing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Steelman. Liam Brady. John Bradley. Amanda Kearney.

Working with Yanyuwa elders, we collected seven rock painting samples for radiocarbon dating from Kamadarringabaya rock shelter on Vanderlin Island in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria (Northern Territory). Hand motifs – prints and stencils – dominate the site, covering the shelter walls and roof, and are said by Yanyuwa to be the hands of the Namurlajanyugku spirit beings. In control experiments, negligible levels of humic acid contamination were shown to be present in the unpainted rock;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James D. Keyser. David Kaiser.

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. Site 24ST560, located northwest of Billings, Montana, contains the most detailed example of a Crow war party tally known in northern Plains rock art. Known from two avocationalist publications, we analyze the site imagery using Crow ledger drawings and Crow ethnographic information, and determine that it represents the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Schaefer.

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. Twelfth Unnamed Cave is a dark-zone cave art site in Tennessee that contains over 300 individual petroglyphs. Like many cave art sites in the American Southeast, the locations of the art within the cave appear to be structured. However, traditional spatial analytical methods have made it difficult to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Olsen. Khan.

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 ritualistic use of various detached human body parts is a circumglobal phenomenon that has been documented for cultures extending backward through time for millennia. Its symbolic purposes are diverse, but war trophies and ancestor worship are two of the most common. Artists’ depictions of displays of human body parts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleni Kotoula. David Robinson. Clare Bedford.

This presentation discusses two complementary approaches for visualization of pictographs; interactive relighting and diagrammatic representation. Visible and false colour Reflectance Transformation Images (RTI) provide enhanced visualization of texture in combination with colour enhancement. By extension, the proposed techniques offer the opportunity to explore the characteristics and application of paint as well as the layering and preservation state of pictographs. The extracted information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radoslaw Palonka. Boleslaw Zych. Vincent MacMillan. Katarzyna Ciomek. Jakub Sliwa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The sandstone multilevel architecture (including famous cliff dwellings) from the central Mesa Verde region, southwestern Colorado in the US Southwest, together with rock art represents Ancestral Pueblo occupation in the prehispanic times. This poster shows the application of various digital techniques for detailed documentation, visualization, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radoslaw Palonka.

Thirteenth century A.D. in the central Mesa Verde region was a time of socio-cultural transformations, climatic changes, and increasing conflicts and violence that took place shortly before the final depopulation of the region. Since 2011 the Sand Canyon-Castle Rock Community Archaeological Project is being conducted and it focuses on the analysis and reconstruction of the settlement and social structure in a community of forty Ancient Pueblo sites dated to the thirteenth century. The project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrzej Rozwadowski. Janusz Woloszyn.

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. Toro Muerto, situated in Arequipa Region in southern Peru, consists of over 2.5 thousand stone blocks covered with petroglyphs, which makes this site unique not only in Peru but also in South America. In this presentation we outline the current results of a new project which aims to document the whole site. This includes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramon Valcarce. Alia Vazquez-Martinez. Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan.

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. Research on the open-air rock art of Galicia has been going on for more than a century. During this time, one aspect that has experienced much change is the recording of the carved panels, starting with techniques that involved direct contact with the rock’s surface and resulted in a more or less adequate rendering of the...