Methodology and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Olsen.

How petroglyph images are recorded in the field is instrumental for analysis, archiving and publishing data. Being prepared to implement multiple advanced imaging techniques provides numerous advantages. Because lighting conditions, preservation and manufacturing techniques vary from one petroglyph locality to the next, having the flexibility to apply different imaging options as appropriate greatly facilitates data retrieval. Many archaeological projects require that the bulk of the image...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Huffman. Frank Earley.

Rather than a western extension of the Plains Village tradition, the Apishapa phase was more likely an eastern extension of the Great Basin Desert culture. Among other things, Great Basin origins explain the Apishapa foraging economy that focused on small mammals, antelope and deer, and meager horticulture. Insubstantial structures and temporary rock shelter habitations attest to residential mobility. As others have noted, Archaic rock art in the Great Basin and Apishapa areas are remarkably...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James D. Keyser.

Cheval Bonnet is a small petroglyph site on Cut Bank Creek, just east of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation that shows a Crow Indian coup counting scene and three other horses, two of which can be identified as the products of Crow artists by their form and the stylized war bonnet worn by each animal. Located in a hidden canyon adjacent to a major stream crossing, the site represents a "calling card" similar to other biographic images drawn both as petroglyphs and arborglyphs during the late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Benn.

Recently discovered geoglyphs at two Late Woodland sites in northwestern Iowa take the form of anthropomorphic turtles, bison, thunderers and a "stickman" similar to the petroglyphs at Pipestone Monument in southern Minnesota. Excavations indicate the geoglyphs functioned as cosmograms where vision quests and other life-renewal rituals probably were conducted. The cosmograms and associated evidence for rituals are compared to ethnographic descriptions of Lakota tribal myths to reveal possible...

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 Silvia Tomaskova. Muzi Msimanga.

Our 2017 fieldwork in the Northern Cape, South Africa presented us with a dilemma: how do methods of rock art research aimed at studying image making help us understand petroglyphs that may not be "images". The site Wildebeest Kuil near Kimberley, Northern Cape has two discrete areas of engravings: an area covered with distinct images of animals, humans, "geometric patterns" (80% of engravings), and a second adjacent area covered with peckings and stone modifications that do not easily translate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meg Berry.

Murujuga comprises one of the most complex rock art provinces in the world.The iron red boulders of this ancient landscape host petroglyphs which communicate a myriad of sociocultural dynamics of groups utilizing changing landscapes over millennia.These petroglyphs are situated within a landscape marked by complex and diverse archaeological signatures including stone arrangements,lithic scatters,quarries,middens and hut structures.Currently our archaeological understanding of the prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Steelman. Victoria Muñoz. Jeremy Freeman. Carolyn Boyd.

Exploring new applications of portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to the study of rock art, we report the determination of paint layer stratigraphy based upon measured elemental levels. In Lower Pecos rock art, we were able to discern when red and yellow paints superimpose black paints based on elevated levels of manganese. This ability to see underneath paint layers with "X-ray vision" shows great promise in answering stratigraphic ambiguities, complimenting Dino-Lite digital microscopy....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Esther Jacobson-Tepfer.

This paper describes the complex process of documenting two huge rock art complexes and a third very old complex, in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia. Previous to our work in this region at the Mongolian border with Russia and China, all three complexes were virtually unknown except to local herding populations. Our project began with a survey of a broad region in Bayan Ölgiy aimag and the identification of the complexes on which we wished to concentrate our efforts. This initial phase was...

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 Anna Roosevelt. Christopher Davis.

Rock painting flourished in several parts of the world, including eastern South America. Traditions that can be important evidence not only of development of art, society, and religion but also of science and technology. Techniques for direct dating are in active development these days, but archaeological stratigraphy and radiometric dating can give an important baseline to compare with other methods. We present an example of this strategy and its results at Monte Alegre, Brazil and briefly...

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 Genevieve Von Petzinger.

Geometric signs are found at nearly all Upper Paleolithic rock art sites in Europe. Created between 10,000 and 40,000 BP, the signs are one of the major thematic categories of art from this era, however, they are often not as well-documented as their figurative counterparts. While there are some sites (e.g., Grotte Chauvet) where detailed inventories have been created for all of the imagery, there are many other sites where this has yet to be carried out. The geometric signs have the potential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James D. Keyser.

A petroglyph panel at 48SW85 in southwestern Wyoming presents a convincing case for the use of rock art imagery in hunting magic rituals. Based on differential weathering and revarnishing of the petroglyphs, different stylistic signatures of artists carving various animals and humans, and key superimpositions, the panel can be confidently identified as the product of at least half a dozen artists reusing the site for more than a century, and possibly much longer. The panel's basic structure...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Sherwood. Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

This presentation reports on a new rock art site from Kentucky, brought to the authors' attention by local citizens. Inside a large sandstone rockshelter, more than a dozen black pictographs show several anthropomorphic characters. These images bear distinctive features and regalia associated with the "Redhorn Cycle" hero narrative reported by Paul Radin in 1948 from his ethnographic work among the Ho-Chunk. The rock art from this "Morning House" strongly resembles well-known Mississippian...

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 Mark Wagner. Kayeleigh Sharp. Go Matsumoto. Mary McCorvie. Heather Carey.

Native Americans recognized unique natural features as representing parts of ritual landscapes imbued with power that also contained cultural elements including rock art and mortuary sites. One such landscape within Illinois consists of a three mile long isolated bluff segment located on the now-drained Mississippi River floodplain that prehistorically was surrounded by a mosaic of lakes, ponds, and swamps. In this paper we use GIS, LIDAR, and archaeological data to reconstruct the ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meg Berry.

Murujuga, located off the northwest coast of Australia, possesses one of the largest and most vibrant open air rock art galleries on the planet. On Murujuga, low erosion rates, durable geology, and growing evidence from the wider region has allowed for archaeological contextualization of rock art into deep time; giving researchers the opportunity to investigate both the changing social dynamics of groups and the stimuli for this change over thousands of years. The main objective of this paper is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador.

Abstract In this paper we present a systematic comparative analysis of the most characteristic cultural traits of sites, apparently distant in time and space, that share fundamental aspects, concerning basic geomorphological and landscape features, settlement patterns, and rain and fertility symbolism depicted in rock art. The direct association between political power and religious authority, social prestige and the privilege of presiding ritual performances appears to be evident. While in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Hayward. Frank Schieppati. Michael Cinquino.

Two data sets-Jonsson Marquet's proposed chronological framework for rock art of the Windward Islands and Alistair Bright's reconstruction of settlement, socio-political and exchange networks within the same region-provide a context for examining the interrelationships among the material cultural correlates (petroglyphs, settlement types, pottery) of various aspects of the area's, as well as inter-area prehistoric cultural components.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jodi Reeves Flores. M. Scott Thompson.

Currently, rock art research generates large amounts of digital data, both un-structured and structured. This paper discusses the significant role that digital data management systems and repositories such as the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) can play in the examination, management, and long-term curation of these data. tDAR is a dynamic digital platform that allows archaeologists to conduct research with and manage their data. The paper describes how rock art researchers can use tDAR to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Ruuska.

In this paper, I examine the materiality of memory practices as expressed in rock art associated with the Ghost Dance in the Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, and Eastern California. Building on Jeff Malpas’ (2010) claim that "place is perhaps the key term for interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences in the 21st C." (Creswell 2015:1), and Susan Kuchler’s perspective of ‘landscape as memory’ in which embodied experiences "govern the mnemonic transmission of land-based...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marsha Sims.

Research ties Mesoamerican search for ancestors to U.S. rock art. A hero in Mexican Aztec legend fought his sister, Coyolxauhqui, and the titans, decapitating her, rolling her body down the mountain, and leaving her head on the mountain. Coyolxauhqui is a floating head on Mesoamerican murals, decapitated and dismembered on the Coyolxauhqui stone. She was the moon, queen, and an avatar of their Earth Mother. She is commemorated in Basketmaker and later rock art in Colorado and Utah at 5 Faces and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Arnett.

Interior Salish rock art sites on the British Columbia Plateau are multi-component assemblages which include the geomorphology, the rock art and other surface and subsurface elements such as trails, manuports, petroforms, hearths, lithics, radiocarbon dates, flora and fauna. Defining the inter-relationships of these components is essential to understanding the site formation process. In addition, direct historical and cultural continuity between these sites and Interior Salish descendant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Chase. Genevieve von Petzinger. Oscar Moro Abadia.

The question of whether Neandertals created art is one that is currently under debate within the field of prehistoric art studies. Originally thought to be brutish and unintelligent, Neandertals have recently come to be acknowledged as complex humans with symbolic capacities, through discoveries of Neandertal-associated modern behaviours including burials, pigment use, and ornament creation. One of the last hold outs separating the symbolic and artistic abilities of Neandertals from those of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Goodmaster. Erin Helton.

Recent digital documentation efforts at Panther Cave (41VV83) have yielded a detailed record of current site conditions and provide a wealth of geospatial data pertinent to the prehistoric art preserved at the site. Three-dimensional laser scanning (LiDAR) and digital photogrammetry were integrated to record a highly accurate digital model of the rockshelter and its immediate environment. This documentation effort provides a robust corpus of data for use in the digital visualization, analysis,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryn Tapper.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lenville Stelle.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only François Gagnon. Dagmara Zawadzka.

The rock art of northeastern Ontario is less well-known than its counterpart in northwestern Ontario. However, recent explorations of the numerous lakes and meandering rivers in the Canadian Shield have led to the identification of previously unknown sites, as well as to the proper documentation of previously known sites, thus increasing greatly the sample and allowing for the emergence of a more complex regional picture. As an example, the rock art of Temagami area is discussed. This large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leah McCurdy. M. Kathryn Brown.

In 2016, we discovered a sage’s chamber in the El Castillo acropolis at the ancient Maya site of Xunantunich, Belize. In the Late Classic Tut Building on the east side of El Castillo, all interior and exterior plaster walls are incised with "graffiti." The total number of elements documented is nearly 300 with themes ranging from human and animal forms to glyphs and multi-figure scenes. We expect to encounter more in future field seasons. Based on a variety of factors, we view this as practice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Wagner. Kayleigh Sharp.

Illinois rock art studies conducted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries typically used drawings, tracings, and print photography to record prehistoric petroglyphs and pictographs. These types of studies have been replaced in recent years by a variety of new methods including digital photography, DSTRETCH enhancement, photogrammetry, pXRF analysis, and other technologies. These new techniques have greatly enhanced our ability to quickly and accurately record rock art sites in comparison to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig. Karen Steelman. Marvin Rowe.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Freeman. Victoria Munoz. Carolyn Boyd.

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas retain hundreds of rock art murals exhibiting varying degrees of preservation. Since 2009 Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center has been documenting the murals, some of which date back 4,000 years. As part of this project, we collect Legacy Photographs to assess historic deterioration of the art. Analysis of these photographs has revealed significant changes in the imagery over the past 50 years; however, the factors affecting its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johannes Loubser.

As part an overall effort by the Tennessee Valley Authority to conserve, manage, and present Middle Mississippian era pictographs and petroglyphs to a visiting public, Stratum Unlimited recorded 101 motifs from 47 panels at Painted Bluff, a steep south-facing limestone cliff overlooking the Tennessee River in northeastern Alabama. Results from the recording include an assessment of pictograph and petroglyph techniques, types and numbers of motifs, stratigraphic overlap and sequencing of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

We provide an overview of a signature prehistoric cave art form in the Southeast of North America: "Mud Glyph" images traced and/or carved into plastic sediments inside the dark zones of caves. Today, we know of 21 such mud glyph caves in Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky and Virginia. Sometimes, mud glyphs form elaborate cave art compositions. While this art form has roots in the Archaic Period more than 3000 years ago, its greatest frequency occurs during the Mississippian Period after AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Roberts. Jerod Roberts. Charles Koenig. Karen Steelman.

For over twenty years, Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center has studied and promoted the preservation of rock art in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands along the U.S.-Mexico border. In July 2017, Shumla launched the three-year Alexandria Project designed to gather an extensive dataset from over 350 known rock art sites in Val Verde County, where the majority of US sites are located. Research questions driving data collection reflect two main aspects: geospatial distribution and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramon Valcarce. Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan.

Horse riding scenes are arguably about the most emblematic representations within post-paleolithic open air rock art in Galicia (NW Iberia). They have been used as a controversial chronological milestone, setting them somewhere between the Final Neolithic and the Iron Age. Such an iconography may be related to a shift in the Human/Nature relationship arising along the Late Prehistory. While not discarding they are showing real activities, we believe the riding scenes could be emphasizing a new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Brown.

Archaeologists typically dissect rock art stylistically, symbolically, and chronologically. Symbols, in particular, lead to studies of representational imagery, entoptic phenomena, or religious icons. What remains underexplored is the concept of animism and its related behavioral activities. This paper applies a behavioral theory of communication to study the interactions between people and things. It uses performance characteristics analysis to determine the activities associated with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador.

This presentation describes the process of recording and documenting the pictographs found at the site of Chalcatzingo, Morelos, in central Mexico. It shows the way in which state of the art technology is used for the first time at the site for this purpose. Iconographic analysis, landscape archaeology and the analysis of painting techniques and materials are as well employed to enrich the interpretation of rock art at the site. Upon this basis we elaborate a hypothesis about their relations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melinda Leach.

Prehistoric rock art increasingly is understood to be embedded in complex cultural systems of social routines, kin networks, economic landscapes, technological change, seasonal population movements, domestic and task-specific foraging behaviors, and variable gendered activities. The Holocene record of occupation and use of the High Rock Country in the Northern Great Basin provides an opportunity to explore such complex contexts of rock art. Rich lithic sources, strategic locations for hunting,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Wilkinson.

This research is part of a larger ethno-archaeological investigation of the use of caves in modern Haitian Vodou rituals in Northern Haiti. This paper explores the modern rock art left in the caves as a result of Vodou ceremonies, in particular paint and veve (veve are symbols drawn out with cornstarch used to call various spirits to ceremonies, and are an intrinsic part of Vodou). The art in question included both permanent and ephemeral works, ranging from simple graffiti to caves painted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve Von Petzinger.

It has been proposed that much of the rock art of Upper Paleolithic (UP) Europe can be interpreted as the result of shamanistic visions and related spiritual practices (e.g., Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1998; Clottes and Lewis-Williams 2001; Lewis-Williams 2002; Whitley 2005). This theory is based on a combination of analogy with modern hunter-gatherer groups, and recent neuroscience studies on the universality of human physiological response when in a trance state. Specific geometric signs found...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Boyd.

Pecos River style rock art was produced in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico during the Archaic beginning around 2700 BC. This style is characterized by finely executed anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures arranged in highly-ordered, complex compositions. Pecos River style anthropomorphs are frequently portrayed with a series of dots emanating upwards from an open mouth. Zoomorphic figures of felines and deer are also represented with this pictographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Munoz. Jeremy Freeman. Carolyn Boyd.

One of the most important, yet often neglected, components of any archaeological project is what happens outside of the field—processing the data. Without meticulously organizing and archiving the data we collect, these fast accumulating pieces of information become no more useful than a pile of papers pushed to the corners of our desks. Worse yet, irreplaceable data could be lost. Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center is taking measures to avoid this pitfall by developing methods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Pritchard. Johannes Loubser. Jan Simek. L Mashburn.

Located in northeastern Alabama, Painted Bluff contains motifs similar to ones found on Mississippian ceremonial objects, and an associated charred river cane dating to between AD 1300 and 1440. Approximately 80 images were recorded on the limestone cliffs of the bluff, most of which are red ocher paintings, a few done with yellow pigment, one containing white, and at least three separate thinly-plastered surfaces with fine-line incisions. Following initial recording of the site by Simek,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Loendorf.

Pictographs and a few petroglyphs of tobacco plants, tobacco gardens and tobacco headdresses are found at a dozen sites across Montana and Wyoming. Very similar images painted on Crow Indian Tobacco Society pipe bags, moccasins and other clothing strongly suggest the pictographs and petroglyphs were made by the Crow. High concentrations of tobacco pollen at one site suggest it was the location of a tobacco garden