The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Polly Schaafsma’s pioneering work on the rock art of the American Southwest in the 1960s not only helped establish her as the authority in this region, but also as one of the first American scholars to focus on rock art research. The themes of place, style, and tradition recur in her work, and by her commitment to analysis of style and imagery, she has demonstrated the value of rock art as a major resource in reconstructing past cultures and traditions. She has utilized rock art to chronicle cultural change, and in collaboration with Curtis Schaafsma, she investigated the origins of the Pueblo Kachina Cult. In the 1980s she wrote on theory and method in rock art studies, and this work is still indispensable, reaching far beyond the Southwest to guide those working with rock art worldwide. Schaafsma continues to bring contemporary issues to the attention of the wider research community, as shown with her recent book on rock art and ethics. Thus, as we honor her many significant contributions to rock art studies, we invited papers on these topics from the general standpoint of rock art research with special reference to the legacy of this highly influential scholar.

Other Keywords
Iconography and Art: Rock Art • Ancestral Pueblo • Iconography and epigraphy • Rock Art • Archaic • Ritual and Symbolism • Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology • Iconography and Art • Theory • Landscape Archaeology

Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) • North America (Continent) • New Mexico (State / Territory) • Oklahoma (State / Territory) • Arizona (State / Territory) • Texas (State / Territory) • Sonora (State / Territory) • Chihuahua (State / Territory) • Baja California (State / Territory) • USA (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

  • Documents (12)
Documents
  • Arriving at a Meaningful Rock Art Interpretation (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer. John W. Greer.

    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. Knowing the past through rock art interpretation has been a hallmark of Polly Schaafsma’s rock art studies. She has advocated and practiced her stance that the meaning of rock art is not a guessing game but is instead the result of data collection and analysis completed within a theoretical...

  • Can We See Travelers in Rock Art? (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Fernstrom.

    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. Polly Schaafsma’s extraordinary body of rock art publications allows us to return repeatedly to the images to ask different questions as our knowledge expands. Rock art informs my studies of pre-European Native American murals and 3-dimensional human figures because murals are compositions on...

  • Cultural Landscapes and Migrations in Sandstone Canyon, Southwestern Colorado through Pueblo and Ute Rock Art (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Radoslaw Palonka. Vincent MacMillan. Katarzyna Ciomek. Magdalena Lewandowska.

    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. Sandstone Canyon, located within the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in southwestern Colorado, is one of the biggest canyons of the area. Since 2014 four sites with large rock art panels, previously unknown, have been found in the area. Depictions of rock art at these sites have been...

  • Finding Context for Rock Art Images in the Southwest (2019)
    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...

  • Footsteps of Hopi History or Inscriptions by Spanish Priests? The Elusive and Enigmatic Labyrinth Glyphs of the American West (2019)
    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...

  • Mural Ecology: Walls that bring people together (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelley Hays-Gilpin. Robert Mark. Evelyn Billo.

    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. Our daily news brings much shouting about building giant walls to divide neighbor from neighbor. We optimistically turn our attention to walls that brought people together—Puebloan painted walls. In the 1960s, the painted kiva walls of Pottery Mound, near Albuquerque, brought artist Polly Schaafsma...

  • Out From the Center: Rock-Art of the Chaco World (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Huang.

    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...

  • Polly - Rock Art - And Understanding Chaco (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Vivian.

    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. Polly's long and productive anthropological career has been characterized by her use of art as a means to better interpret the social and organizational characteristics of several prehistoric and historic societies in the American Southwest. Her research has ranged geographically from the northern...

  • Polychrome Perplexities: The Painted Rock Art of the Southern Black Hills (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Linea Sundstrom.

    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...

  • Rock Art Sites in the Permian Basin, New Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Loendorf.

    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. Sacred Sites Research, Inc. and Versar Inc., working in cooperation with the Mescalero Apache Tribe and the Hopi Tribe, recorded and evaluated 17 rock art sites in New Mexico's Permian Basin, a project supported through the Bureau of Land Management programmatic agreement. Sixteen of the sites...

  • Search Beneath the Rock Surface: Legend Chasers, Treasure-hunters and Rock Art in NW Spain (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan. Ramón Fábregas Valcarce.

    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. Polly Schaafsma has often emphasized the use of ethnographic analogy to get insights into the use and ideological framework of ancient pictographs. While this is both feasible and reasonable in Southwestern rock art, the numerous petroglyphs known in the Galician region mainly belong to a period...

  • The Uses of Stylistic Analysis in Rock Art Studies (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Livio Dobrez. Patricia Dobrez.

    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. Polly Schaafsma has made a major contribution to rock art studies with her detailed analysis of rock art styles in the American Southwest. The joint authors wish to investigate the concept of style, with its roots in art history and application in archaeology and anthropology. In so doing, we...