Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Stoll. George Stoll.

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 painted parietal art of prehistoric San Bushmen of southern Africa has been in the public eye since the 1920s. Iconographic and stylistic differences within the San artistic corpus have been attributed to distinctions of time and space within and among the many centers of image concentration. Rock art found in the ravines...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven James.

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. The Hawaiian Islands have a variety of rock art sites I have examined and photographed on five of the eight main islands over the past 50 years, with most of the research conducted more recently as summarized in this presentation. Some islands have only a few petroglyph locations, whereas the Big Island...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst.

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. Historically, researchers have interpreted rock art based on ethno-historical accounts of ceremonies as male-created and male-oriented experiences and spaces. This has led to researchers ignoring traditional women’s roles in the creation of rock art as well as women’s interaction with rock art spaces. I examine how Lakota women...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Lindsay. Timothy Murphy.

The Honda Ridge pictograph panel contains highly stratified elements painted on a smooth, reflective surface, offering a unique opportunity to explore prehistoric rock art production. We adapted non-invasive, digital microscopy methods from the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center to apply stratigraphic analysis within a 1m x 1m section of this superimposed, monochromatic panel. The reflective host rock preserves observable characteristics of prehistoric painting techniques, from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenny Ni.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th 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 Plains Biographic rock art depicting the coups and accomplishments of human warriors. While horses are equally present, most of them are secondary to the narratives depicted and appear as ridden mounts or captured wealth. However, an unusual panel found in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John W. Greer. Mavis Greer.

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. Keyser’s interest in horse styles in rock art of the Northwestern Plains has expanded our knowledge and ways of thinking about this image. His recent work to quantify differences in Crow and Blackfoot horses has led to identifying infusions of each group into the other’s territory. However, his identification system has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This study examines the spatial patterning of shield iconography at late Pueblo III sites (A.D. 1250-1300) in the Tsegi Canyon system, as an indicator of shared group identity. In the mid-13th century, the Tsegi Canyon region of northeastern Arizona followed a greater regional trend of communities coalescing into defensive high canyon alcoves, accompanied by the adoption of shield iconography, likely influenced by Freemont traditions to the north. These images are variously interpreted to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Alberti.

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. Archaic foragers represent one extreme of the relationship between routes and roots. There is a wealth of evidence in the US Southwest of the itinerant, ambulatory lifeways of ancient populations—impermanent campsites, lithic scatters near likely animal trails and watering holes, and the enigmatic rock art that appears along watercourses or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liv Winnicki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Commonly across the Puebloan Southwest, incised lines are observed adjacent to petroglyph panels. Often, these features are simply labeled as “axe sharpening grooves.” Many archaeologists label them in their site forms as such, tally them, and tend to not interpret them further. In this experimental research, I push back on this over simplified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley. Tony Quach.

Yokuts ethnography indicates that pictograph sites passed from father to son to grandson within shamanic lineages, suggesting episodic painting at these locations. This practice is archaeologically supported by motif superimpositions and minor stylistic differences at sites. An in-situ pXRF study of red motifs was conducted at site CA-TUL-2871, Springville, CA, in the hopes of analytically distinguishing painting episodes, based on the assumption that chemically dissimilar pigments may have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Valenzuela. Indira Montt. Marcela Sepúlveda. Persis Clarkson.

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. This study reviews the range of interpretative approaches that have delineated rock art research in the Atacama Desert, which has been mainly informed by ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and landscape archaeology perspectives. We focus on the role that prevailing Andean archaeological theories have played in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Krantz.

This paper examines what might be called the "palimpsest panel" rock art tradition of the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. Palimpsest panels are rock faces with petroglyphs that have accrued in a layered fashion through time. Prior research into such panels has typically focused on questions of chronology, each layer representing a distinct culture-historical era of iconographic production or a chapter in a linear chronology. Here, however, I move away from the traditional chronological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nóra Nic Aoidh.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite roads and railways around the world being based on the widths of their bodies, non-human animals are now systematically excluded from much of modern western life. In some of the most human-populated areas, animals are forbidden from indoor spaces and from many private outdoor spaces. However, these carefully curated and restrictive relationships we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uri Berger. Gonen Sharon.

Excavation in the Shamir Dolmen Field (comprising over 400 dolmens), on the northern Israeli basaltic terrains, was carried out following the discovery of enigmatic rock art engravings on the ceiling of one of the largest dolmens ever recorded in the Levant. Excavation of this dolmen, covered by a basalt capstone weighing some 50 tons, revealed a secondary multi-burial (of both adults and children) rarely described in a dolmen context in Israel. Engraved into the rock ceiling above the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Bies.

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. Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin is one of the areas where Dr. Larry Loendorf has worked for years. This paper talks about a new rock art site in north-central portion of the Big Horn Basin. In 2015 two ranch women Lynette Kelley Cook and Phyllis Preator contacted the author about rock art in the northern Bighorn...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robyn Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A number of sizable rock art sites occur along the ephemeral drainages of the Bennett Hills located in the Snake River Plain of south central Idaho. The Bennett Hills are a range of tangled ridges, canyons and drainages that trend east-west for over 60 miles. This poster session will highlight four of those rock art sites (Thorn Creek, Grasshopper Cave, Hidden...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Ure.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. LiDAR scanning and photogrammetry are quickly becoming extremely useful tools for archaeologists. This is especially the case for documenting complex rock art panels that can be difficult to fully represent using traditional techniques constrained to 2D formats. In contrast, terrestrial LiDAR and photogrammetry provide a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Francis.

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. For over 30 years, Larry Loendorf has spurred rock art research throughout Wyoming and Montana. No where have his contributions been more important and deeply felt than at the Legend Rock State Petroglyphs site (48HO4) in Wyoming. Through encouraging the use of standard archaeological methodology at rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

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. Certain current rock art debates involve methodological rather than empirical issues (as incorrectly but commonly assumed), reflecting researchers’ unfamiliarity with principles of symbolic analysis and the resulting functions and meanings of rock art sites. One key error concerns the fact that symbols are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liam Brady. Luke Taylor. Sally May. Paul Tacon.

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. A core feature of rock art studies concerns the characterization and analysis of motif styles to generate new insights into their function, meaning, and symbolism in the deep and recent past. Yet what is oftentimes overlooked is attention to the production sequence used to create motifs, and what this can reveal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Mahan. Alexandra Kuo. David Stalla. Gregor Bader. Brandi MacDonald.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eswatini is home to several rock art sites of the Late Stone Age in Southern Africa. Ochres, iron-oxide rich pigments, are present in many of these sites but their compositions are yet unknown. Previous studies of ochres have shown the potential for the identification of trade, resource management, and other aspects of human behavior. The analysis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Figueroa.

The physical landscape of Honduras was and continues to be home to a diverse group of indigenous groups, each with distinct cultural traditions, artistic styles, and sociopolitical configurations. In prehistory, this landscape was imbued with cultural meaning in a variety of ways, from the monumental to the perishable. This paper presents and discusses what we know about the rock art of central and southern Honduras, which contains a variety of iconographic rock art styles within a very limited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darryl Wilkinson.

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. Following the incorporation of New Mexico into the Spanish Empire, Christianity became an ever more powerful force across the region. Traditionally, we think of Christianity as a "world religion," by definition a trans-local phenomenon. Moreover, whenever Christianity takes on any "local" characteristics, it is assumed that this represents a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Gambrill. Andrew Womack.

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. Rock imagery can be found across the globe, but research on this topic is still widely segmented by present political boundaries. In this study we transcend boundaries at the state level in the southeastern United States to better recognize and analyze patterns of rock imagery types and their environmental...

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...