Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)
76-100 (156 Records)
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. In recent years, rock art researchers have adopted a variety of automated methods that classify rock art images from high-resolution photographs and 3D models. These methods not only aid in the documentation of rock art, but can also assist with interpreting complex panels with multiple types of images...
On the Margin, Marginal Too? A Western Outpost of Paleolithic Cantabrian Cave Art (NW Iberia) (2021)
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. The Franco-Cantabrian group of cave art ranks among the best known examples of Paleolithic symbolic behavior. For more than a century no decorated cave was reported beyond the Nalón Valley in the center of Asturias, until the carvings and paintings from Cova Eirós were discovered. At more than 100 km from the Nalón,...
The Ontology of Landscape and Hunter-Gatherer Rock Writing (2024)
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. Landscapes are cultural constructs, shaped by cognition and actualized in behavior. Hunter-gatherer landscapes are traditionally viewed in two terms: settlement patterns and systems, and related adaptive/subsistence niches and patches. While useful, these approaches embody the epistemological imperialism of Western...
Origins and Tenacity of Myth: Part II—Ethnography (2024)
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. Hunter-gatherer artists of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas produced Pecos River style (PRS) rock art as early as 5,500 years ago. In 2016, Boyd identified patterns in PRS murals similar to the mythologies of the ancient Nahua (Aztec) and the present-day Huichol (Wixárika). She advanced the hypothesis...
Origins and Tenacity of Myth: Part I—Archaeology (2024)
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. Origins and Tenacity of Myth is a comprehensive study of Pecos River style (PRS) pictographs in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is a collaborative project between Texas State University and Shumla Archaeological Center. This presentation addresses the...
Out From the Center: Rock-Art of the Chaco World (2019)
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. Chaco Canyon contains multitudes of petroglyphs and pictographs, yet rock art has not been a prevalent line of evidence in the archaeological study of that pre-contact culture. More than 15,000 Ancestral Puebloan elements attest to the importance of the role of iconography within the canyon. And the...
An Overview of Painted Rock Representation in the Utcubamba Basin, Eastern Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster summarizes several years of investigations into painted rock representation and its social context within the Utcubamba Basin, Amazonas, Eastern Peru. This poster has three aims. The first, to provide an overview of the Utcubamba basin’s forms of painted rock representation. This is significant to a broader history of the region as there are...
Pahranagat Patterned Bodies and Big Horn Sheep (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lincoln County Rock Art Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) Inventory Project in Nevada focused on the rock art from the Mount Irish, Shooting Gallery and Pahroc ACECs. All three of these areas form part of a distinctive style region within the Great Basin. This is defined by the presence of the Patterned Bodied and Solid Bodied Figures which were...
Painting Methods and Process—a Compositional Analysis of Pecos River Style Murals (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A compositional analysis of pictographs of the Lower Pecos (LP) Canyonlands, located in Southwest Texas and Northern Mexico is presented. The complex systems utilized by LP artists in their painting process are examined, including symmetrical organization of forms and intentional arrangements of figures in a scene (typically a portion of the site). A...
Patterned Pictographs: The Rock Imagery of Eagle Nest Canyon in a Regional Context (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rock imagery of Eagle Nest Canyon (ENC) is well known to many archaeologists and canyon visitors, especially at three sites: Eagle Cave, Kelley Cave, and Skiles Shelter. However, six additional rock imagery sites within ENC and adjacent tributaries are infrequently visited but still provide...
The Persistence of Presence in the Rock Art Traditions of the Great Lakes (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While recent scholarship has fruitfully considered the importance of Indigenous ontological commitments (e.g., to power and place) in the creation of rock art, notions of presence as a discrete component of an image’s being remain underexplored. In this contribution, I seek to examine these notions as distinct from...
Petroglyph Panels in Isolation: Differences in Cultural Expression through Rock Art Placement in the Landscape of Petrified Forest National Park (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Petrified Forest National Park" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across Petrified Forest National Park, ancestral Puebloans left their mark on the landscape through the creation of thousands of petroglyph panels. While the exact meaning behind the glyphs depicted in petroglyph panels has been blurred by the passage of time and poses a formidable interpretive challenge to archaeologists, the...
Petroglyphs in Context: Documenting and Interpreting the Chillihuay Archaeological Complex, Southern Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With over 1,000 individual pictorial elements, Chillihuay is among the largest and most impressive concentration of petroglyphs in southern Peru. Carved on geologically distinct rock outcrops high above the Chorunga Valley, these anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, abstract, and geometrical designs were distributed along narrow trails and hard-to-reach canyons...
Petroglyphs in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands: Preliminary Analysis of Context, Style, and Chronology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Petroglyphs have been an understudied form of rock art in the Lower Pecos canyonlands of Texas, in large part due to the small number of sites known to include carved, incised, or pecked designs. The most famous petroglyph site in the region is Lewis Canyon, where over 1,000 figurative petroglyphs were pecked into the limestone bedrock. Aside from Lewis Canyon...
The Petroglyphs of Quilcapampa la Antigua (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wari and the Far Peruvian South Coast: Final Results of Excavations in Quilcapampa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Quilcapampa la Antigua is hypothesized by Jennings et al. (in press) to be a "moving place", strongly associated with roads leading up out of the valley bottom onto the pampa above. As the roads near the site, they pass beneath white sandstone cliffs. The visually striking cliff face is...
Petroglyphs on the Periphery: Rock Art in the Canadian Maritimes (2018)
Ongoing investigation of the Algonquian rock art of the Canadian Maritimes reveals that while some sites, such as Kejimkujik Lake, are well documented as a result of longstanding conservation strategies, these and other petroglyph sites have yet to be adequately and comprehensively framed within their archaeological, ethnohistorical and ethnographic contexts. Combining a landscape archaeology approach with theoretical positions emerging from the ‘ontological turn’ in archaeology, my research...
Pictographs on Artery Lake, Bloodvein River System, Extreme Northwest Ontario, Canada: (2018)
The pictographs of the Bloodvein River, Artery Lake, Ontario offer an important view of rock art design and purpose during the late prehistoric period and perhaps continuing well into the nineteenth century. All images are finger applied and utilize iron oxide based pigment. The sites appear to be of varying function. The largest and most complex consists of seven or eight panels and may reveal a narrative of healing associated with the Fourth Degree of the Midewiwin or Ojibwe Grand Medicine...
Polychrome Perplexities: The Painted Rock Art of the Southern Black Hills (2019)
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. Infrared, ultraviolet, and D-Stretch imaging has provided a more complete view of a complex set of black and red painted rock from the southern Black Hills of South Dakota. The painted designs include bison, bears, other quadrupeds, humans, net-, web-, and gridlike figures, atlatl darts, hand- and...
Portable X-ray Fluorescence of Lower Pecos Mobiliary Art: New Insights Regarding Chaîne Opératoire, Context, and Chronology (2018)
Painted pebbles are the primary mobiliary art found in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico. Previous studies of these artifacts have focused on stylistic variation of the imagery and interpretation of the role these artifacts played within Lower Pecos societies. The focus of this study is the use of portable X-ray fluorescence on Lower Pecos painted pebbles to conduct elemental analyses, providing insight into the chaîne opératoire of painted pebble production....
Portable XRF Analysis of Rock Art Pigments Used in Pictographs across the Great Basin (2018)
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...
Practical and Interpretive Implications of Experimental Hand Imprints (2019)
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...
Predation and Production in the Rock Art of the Middle Orinoco: Food for Thought (2019)
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...
Prehistoric Pointillism: Rock Art near ‘Amlah, Oman (2019)
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...
The Qajartalik Petroglyph Site (2021)
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...
Recent Documentation Efforts at Greybull South, Wyoming (2023)
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...