Rock Art and Sacred Spaces: Recent Approaches to the Study of Ritual Landscapes

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andres Troncoso.

To understand the relationships among rock art and ritual landscapes needs recognize how the process of making engaged in a set of spatial and social practices. These practices create a field of relationships that define the rituality of rock art as well as the sacredness of landscapes. In this paper, we discuss this process in a prehispanic agrarian community of Central North Chile. We propose the process of making rock art related to the animation of a world constituted by a web of non-human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johannes Loubser.

As far as can be ascertained, all documented petroglyph boulders in northern Georgia and western North Carolina occur next-to old Indian overland trails or certain river corridors, specifically at transition points on the landscape. Moreover, these transition points occur between sites with mounds and town houses at one end and certain mountain tops at the other. Whereas a few Cherokee accounts explicitly mention petroglyph boulders at such locales, the placement of some others can be inferred...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julio Amador.

Based on landscape archaeology, achaeoastronomy, the analysis of rock art iconography, ethnohistoric and ethnographic documents, this paper proposes to define the factors that determine the sacredness of rock art sites in the Sonoran Desert. Well characterized common patterns can be found in most of the rock art sites that will be described, facts that confirm with certainty we can speak of shared cultural traits within the region.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Tratebas.

Early Hunting petroglyphs in a Black Hills canyon depict hunting situations and ceremonies. A loop-line motif, that is unique to this rock art tradition, signifies drive lines and trap structures. Loop-lines occur only at canyon locations that are appropriate settings for trap structures. The canyon starts on the margin of a basin that provides good grazing. Entry to the canyon is funnel-shaped like the V-shaped wings of hunting traps. Recent discovery of a cairn drive line that utilizes another...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

Prehistoric rock art has been relatively unknown in the American Southeast until the past few decades. In the 1970's Wellman's catalog of North American rock art contained a handful of sites east of the Mississippi River; today there are hundreds of sites recorded for Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and areas east of the Appalachian Mountains. The great majority of these sites probably date to the Late Prehistoric period, and there are clear regional variations in how rock art was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jewel Gentry. Donna L. Gillette.

Rock art images, generally associated with outdoor landscapes and boulders occur in an unexpected context and very sacred space in the California Spanish colonial community of Mission San Miguel the Arcángel. The Mission Community consisted primarily of Salinan and Tulare native populations and included neophyte Indians from previously established nearby Missions. It has been suggested that images found etched throughout the sanctified interior are analogous to California Indian rock art with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Weisman.

Total solar eclipses are perhaps the most dramatic of celestial events. During a total eclipse, for a few moments, while the moon passes unseen between the earth and the sun, viewers positioned directly in line with the sun and moon experience totality. The sun goes black. Day turns suddenly to dusk, winds stir and animals assume their night time behaviors. It is then and only then that the sun’s luminous and variable corona becomes visible. Solar eclipse representations have been widely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Figueroa.

Caves and shelters hold a special place among Mesoamerican cultures. Some of the earliest evidence of human occupation in this region is found inside these natural features, where well-preserved materials attest to the detailed knowledge past populations had of their surrounding landscapes and resources. In later time periods, caves were treated as the portals to the underworld and became an essential part of Mesoamerican ideology. The landscape of the Santa Elena highlands of southwestern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karly Law. Ben Chiewphasa. Lorena Craig.

The present study examines rock art and its ritual landscapes as the physical remnants of evolving cultural traditions. By incorporating an evolutionary framework in rock art studies, we can determine if rock art traditions evolved via descent with modification versus blending and borrowing of ideas. This project focuses on Fremont and Ceremonial Style shield-bearing warrior motifs associated with ritual contexts and spaces (animal medicine, cosmology, and shamanism). Drawing upon several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paola Dematte. Paola Demattè.

In China, rock art is often found in areas considered peripheral to the so-called cradle of Chinese civilization. However, its patterns of landscape and space use are not remarkably different from those of established religions or political institutions whose artistic production in the landscape is generally not understood as “rock art”. Historic Taoist or Buddhist rock carvings and Confucian cliff inscriptions are also associated with travel routes (land, sea or river) or remarkable landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franz Scaramelli. Kay Scaramelli.

The rock paintings of the Parguaza River form part of a tradition that extends back thousands of years. We can only speculate on why the paintings were made, who made them, or what their original meaning may have been. However, rock art provides an excellent index of the symbolic world of the peoples who settled the area, as manifested in different traditions. Local belief systems refer to ancestral territorial ties, and the mythical and ritual significance of mountains, caves, and rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Olsen.

Saudi Arabia has a rich cultural heritage that is amply represented in the extensive rock art from north to south along the western half of the Arabian Peninsula. Two petroglyph localities, Jubbah and Shuwaymis, were just awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. Representing a wide temporal range and diverse styles, it is clear that the art is concentrated adjacent to ancient lakes, along wadis, and around other sources of ephemeral pools of rainwater. This study examines the distribution of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brigitte Faugere.

As in other regions of the world, the rock art of northern Michoacan (Mexico) has to be seen within a given landscape. But the study of the El Paraiso petroglyphs (Zacapu) shows that there is in reality a complex set of intricate scales of landscapes: since a macro scale that involves the whole surrounding environment to a micro scale where the engraved blocks themselves form a sacred geography. The 3D survey realized recently highlights the subtle dialogue between the location of the blocks,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marsha Sims.

Interactions, entry, timing – issues of the “First Americans” have been strongly debated. This research focuses on archaeology, recorded histories/reenactments by people, and on large-scaled forms tying culture heroes, myths, and legends to images of the Paleoindian and use of the Front Range of Colorado. Outrepăssé, reverse hinge, or overshot is a technique for stone reduction used in Clovis technology, in the Solutrean of Europe, and in a workshop/sacred center of Nohmul, a Late Classic site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Ruuska.

The Ojibway on the northern and southern shores of Lake Superior of North America created transitory as well as relatively permanent material expressions of sacred experiences and cultural narratives. Using examples of 'spirit objects' expressed via emplaced pictographs in the landscape in Ontario Canada and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Mide’wiwin birch bark scrolls, and culturally modified ‘storied’ trees, this paper compares and contrasts dynamic and emplaced expressions of the sacred, and...