Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)

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 Whitney Cox.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the talk by Kim Cox, this talk will further detail the importance of the calendar systems preserved in the rock art and its solar interactions at Paint Rock in the Lower Pecos, Texas. By creating rock art panels that intersect with the natural landscape and continue to mark events in time with solar motion, the artists effectively instilled life...

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 Rafael Cruz-Gil.

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sierra de San Francisco cave paintings are a hard to access archaeological site in Mexico’s Baja California Sur state. Visiting some of the largest of them requires traversing a canyon on muleback, two nights of camping, and taxing hikes, as well as hiring guides and coordinating with the local National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH)...

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 Luke Gliganic.

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. Rock engravings are a valuable component of the global archaeological record. They are significant to modern populations and are a visual archive of past cultural expression that can reflect material culture, practices, ideologies, territoriality, social organization, and environments in ways that other archaeological remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Forcier.

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 markings have long captivated the public imagination. More recently, the archaeological field has witnessed a renaissance in rock-marking scholarship as researchers recognize both the continued importance of these features to descendant communities and their...

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 James Keyser.

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. The Vissotzky petroglyphs are located in the northern Rocky Mountains of western Montana. During our 2023 recording project we documented more than 300 representational petroglyphs at the site, but the most unexpected finds were a dozen atlatls, demonstrating that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador.

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. <html> We carry out a detailed iconographic study of one of the reliefs that was carved on the slopes of Cerro Chalcatzingo, in the Mexican State of Morelos, during the Middle Formative period, as well as of several paintings in caves of the State of Guerrero and painted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ségolène Vandevelde.

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. Rock art is one of the oldest forms of symbolic expression, offering unique insights into the human spirit and providing a window into the worldview and cosmogony of its creators. Despite extensive study worldwide, many questions remain unanswered: What is the temporality of use of rock art sites? Is there multiple creation...

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 Karen Steelman.

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. New research is overcoming challenges associated with dating pictographs. The Shumla Archaeological Chemistry Laboratory uses a novel approach with two independent methods to provide secure dating results for paintings. The first method employs plasma oxidation to isolate organic carbon directly from the paint layer for...

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...