Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Current rock art research is interdisciplinary, drawing methods from various fields and knowledge from multiple lines of evidence. These approaches augment and enhance rock art documentation, offer new strategies for effective site management, and facilitate new interpretive insights for rock art provinces around the world. This Rock Art Interest Group–sponsored session provides a forum to share recent rock art research from a wide range of topics that help us to better understand and contextualize rock art, including geochemical analyses, iconographic comparisons, photogrammetric and imaging techniques, Indigenous knowledge, spatial analysis, and radiocarbon dating. The presentations in this symposium discuss rock art in California, Hawaii, Texas, the American Southwest, the Great Plains, the Eastern Woodlands, Mexico, Israel, and Siberia.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)

Documents
  • Assessing the Variability and Chronology of Red Linear Style Pictographs of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas: Final Results (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerod Roberts.

    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. This paper aims to further define the characteristics of Red Linear style (RLS) anthropomorphs and establish its temporal relationship with other regional rock art styles of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas and Coahuila, Mexico. In 2013, Boyd et al. presented a list of diagnostic attributes for the RLS...

  • The Buffalo Creek Site: Animal and Human Rock Art Diversity in Northern Wyoming (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer. John W. Greer.

    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. A small sandstone rockshelter overlooking Buffalo Creek in the southeastern foothills of the Bighorn Mountains has been of interest to researchers since the 1960s due to its shield-bearing warriors, but they account for only a few images at the site. Several different animals here include elk, bears, and...

  • Elk Hooves and Sharpening Grooves: Evaluating the Relationship between Three Rock Art Types on the Great Plains (2023)
    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...

  • Hawaiian Petroglyphs and Pictographs: Patterns and Interpretations from Hawai’i, Maui, Moloka’i, O’ahu, and Kaua’i (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven James.

    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. The Hawaiian Islands have a variety of rock art sites I have examined and photographed on five of the eight main islands over the past 50 years, with most of the research conducted more recently as summarized in this presentation. Some islands have only a few petroglyph locations, whereas the Big Island...

  • Landscape-Based Approaches and Cross-Cultural Exchange: Working toward an Inclusive Model of Study in Fluteplayer Rock Art Research (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlotte Vendome-Gardner. Stephanie Pratt.

    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. The Fluteplayer is a widely recognized figure within American Southwest rock art but has been subjected to a predominantly symbolic method of study rooted in the mis-association with the Kachina Kokopelli and shamanistic ideas of fertility. This has led to the Fluteplayer being misinterpreted, appropriated,...

  • The Many Meanings and Uses of Tomo-Kahni Rock Art (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

    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. Certain current rock art debates involve methodological rather than empirical issues (as incorrectly but commonly assumed), reflecting researchers’ unfamiliarity with principles of symbolic analysis and the resulting functions and meanings of rock art sites. One key error concerns the fact that symbols are...

  • New Research into Environmental Contexts of Southeastern Rock Imageries (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Gambrill. Andrew Womack.

    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. Rock imagery can be found across the globe, but research on this topic is still widely segmented by present political boundaries. In this study we transcend boundaries at the state level in the southeastern United States to better recognize and analyze patterns of rock imagery types and their environmental...

  • Object-Based Image Analysis for Classifying Precontact Native American Mud Glyphs by Production Technique (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Schaefer. Stephen Alvarez. Alan Cressler. Jan Simek.

    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...

  • Ozark Imagery: Documenting Rock Art in the Arkansas Highlands (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Beahm. Angela Gore.

    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. The first published account of Arkansas rock art appeared in the late nineteenth century when public museums and other institutions relied on private citizens as well as professional scholars to report all manner of scientific facts and discoveries. The Arkansas state site files include reports of rock art...

  • Recent Documentation Efforts at Greybull South, Wyoming (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Castañeda. Charles Koenig. Larry Loendorf. Julie Francis.

    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...

  • A Rock Art Depiction of a Desert Kite Hunting Drive Trap (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Rosen. Lior Schwimer. Roy Galili. Naomi Porat. Nadel Dani.

    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. A recently discovered petroglyph panel in the Har Tzuriaz region of the southern Negev, Israel, depicts a typical desert kite, a form of drive trap used for millennia to hunt gazelle. The depiction closely approximates an actual desert kite located less than a kilometer away, but not in direct line of sight....

  • Rock Art in Northern Sonora between Stones and Pigments: Preliminary Archaeometric Analysis (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Beatriz Menéndez Iglesias. Pavel Ulianov Martínez-Pabello. Guillermo Acosta Ochoa. Sergey Sedov. Patricia Pérez-Martínez.

    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. Sonora has a great concentration of rock art in North America. In order to advance in the analysis and documentation of the rock art groups, the project “Cave Documentation and Patina Study in Northern Sonora” was proposed, focused on Cucurpe (Sierra Madre Occidental) and Caborca (Sonoran Desert). The...

  • Shamanic Images in Rock Art in Siberia: Global Theory and Regional Peculiarities (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrzej Rozwadowski.

    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. Southern Siberia is the home of unique images of shamans, some of which show specific associations with rock surface features, notably fissures. In my previous research, I analyzed one such image from the Minusinsk Basin; namely, from the site of Ilinskaya Pisanitsa (Cambridge Archaeological Journal 2017). In...