Iconography and Art: Rock Art (Other Keyword)

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 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 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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Carpio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Known as "The Red Devil" or the "Muñeco", a rock painting in Olmec style, located in the municipality of Amatitlán, department of Guatemala. This was reported at the end of the 70s of the last century and has been visited on numerous occasions by various specialists. In this paper we will present a synthesis of its discovery and the investigations carried out,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst.

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. Hoofprint markings are a widespread macro tradition across the Plains and Great Lakes region but their relationship to elk imagery has not been fully explored. Along those lines, limited research has been done on what is known of track grooves or rock art imagery attributed to Indigenous women sharpening...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Olsen.

Petroglyphs and inscriptions have been investigated in the Arabian Peninsula at least since 1879, when Lady Anne and Wilfrid Blunt crossed the An Nafud desert and stopped at the now famous site of Jubbah in northern Saudi Arabia. Since that time explorers from England, Belgium, Germany, the US, and the Saudi Department of Antiquities, have recorded images from north to south. Archival materials, including field notes, photographs and letters are available at various institutions, but there is no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerod Roberts. Victoria Roberts. Amanda M. Castañeda. Carolyn Boyd.

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas is home to over 350 identified rock art sites depicting multiple styles, complexity, and intricacy. In 2017, Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center launched the Alexandria Project, a three year mission to revisit each known rock art site in Val Verde County and perform baseline documentation, with the aim to answer overarching questions requiring a large and consistent dataset. Our documentation methods utilize Structure from Motion 3D...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Christie.

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. This paper will demonstrate how cultural and chronological context for rock art images can be established using Polly Schaafsma’s Indian Rock Art of the Southwest book. I had photos of rock art from the Navajo Reservation I could not place in any tradition. Number one shows two dark red masked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Grey.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The floristic complexity of native Australian grasslands means they are a haven for biodiversity, and have provided a range of subsistence, material, and sociocultural resources for Indigenous peoples. Disentangling the ways in which people engaged with these environments is a complex task, and has, to date, relied on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Lindsay.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As California wildfires increase in intensity and frequency across the state, archaeologists and land managers work to update fire management strategies and reassess fire risks to sensitive cultural resources. Existing literature indicates that while some buried archaeological resources are fairly protected, rock art sites are particularly susceptible to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

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. A core principle of professional archaeology is the preservation and consideration of context. For studies of rock imagery, this necessitates documenting the context of panels in relationship to the larger cultural landscape. Using landscape theory, I assess the placement of petroglyphs and pictographs at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirk Astroth. T. J. Ferguson. Caitlin McPherson.

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. Meaning and function of rock art elements, especially when related to site location, have been discussed for years. Rock art can represent statements about group identity or social relationships and even demark boundaries or territories. Rock art is a visual legacy created to communicate and reaffirm...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cindy Hsin-yee Huang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Finger flutings are lines and markings drawn with the human hand in soft sediments in caves and rock shelters throughout southern Australia, New Guinea, and southwestern Europe that date back to the Late Pleistocene. Over the last two decades, Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder developed a method to determine characteristics of the creators, such as age, sex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Devlin Gandy. David Robinson.

In rock art research the stratigraphy of a rock art panel can offer great insight into the temporality of a panel, which can then inform many other aspects of analytical inquiry. Yet, making the necessary distinctions between elements is often difficult--as images fade and are worn by time, or the subjective nuances of the recorder. This paper explores novel means of identifying, defining, and separating unique rock art elements in digital space within different digital methodologies.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

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. The Chaco Phenomenon remains a contentious and ever evolving paradigm of Southwest Archaeology. Key to understanding the nature of Chaco is the extent and purpose of the many outlying great house communities scattered across the northern Southwest. One of the farthest flung of these possible outliers is the Mac-Stod great house...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosario Cordero-Fernández.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It seems that the primary function of painted hand imprints on rock shelters in the Middle Ibáñez River Valley (Chile) may have been to assist in promoting social cohesion within and between hunter-gatherer groups. Hand imprints possess the quality of replicating the hand that created them, thus becoming a personal statement. These imprints have been...