(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Rock art researchers have historically been interested in the meaning expressed by images on rock surfaces, focusing their analyses on panels of geometric, abstract, and figurative forms. This approach often leads to the separation of rock art images from their relationships with ancestral creators and viewers, ecological and cultural landscapes, and other human and non-human beings. In other words, by contextualizing these features in strictly archaeological ontologies, we divorce them from the ontology(ies) of their creators.

In this session, we ask ourselves to reconsider the many forms of relationships that rock art images may have within their social and cultural contexts. This approach encourages us to reorient our research questions from “what does rock art mean?” to “how do rock art images relate to the larger social world of the past?” In doing so, we seek to illuminate ways in which rock art has agency and impact within that world. We invite archaeologists working with rock “art” images of any form to explore their relationships with people, places, and other aspects of the past as a means to better discern what the images are doing, and why that may be.

Other Keywords
Ideology • Landscape Archaeology • ontology • Iconography and Art: Rock Art • and Memory • Indigenous • Worldwide

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)

  • Documents (8)
Documents
  • All in a Day's Work? South African Rock Engravings as Bodily Practice and Skill. (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Tomaskova.

    This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study of rock engravings at Wildebeest Kuil, South Africa focuses on bodies, strength, skills and practice necessary to produce the carved images. Rather than ask "what do these images mean?", the project examines the material evidence for labor, effort, skill, strength and repetitive action that would have been only possible through extended...

  • Ancestral Pueblo rock art in the socio-cultural and environmental context: Sand & Rock Creek Canyons in the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, Colorado, USA (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Radoslaw Palonka.

    This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Castle Rock settlement community dated to the 13th century AD located in Sand Canyon and Rock Creek Canyon in the Canyons of the Ancient National Monument, in southwestern Colorado, has been investigated since 2011, among other things focusing on the studies of relations between settlement, rock art, and landscape. In 2023, basing on a few tips from...

  • Capturing Experience through 3D Modeling and Archaeoacoustics in 12th Unnamed Cave, a Dark-Zone Cave Art Site in Tennessee (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Schaefer.

    This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent advances in 3D modeling have allowed archaeologists to explore cave art sites as dynamic spaces where perception and physical experience played active roles in the formation of said artwork. In the American Southeast, where caves were and still are seen by many Indigenous peoples as portals to another spiritual world, 3D reconstructions have much...

  • Iconographies of Interaction: Relating Rock Art Images in Western Colorado (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mairead Doery.

    This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North American rock art researchers have long relied on stylistic conventions for identifying the age, cultural association, and, therefore, presumed “meaning” of petroglyphs and pictographs. These categories project archaeological lenses onto Indigenous iconography; when employed at rock art sites baring multiple iconographic “styles”, this approach...

  • Making It “Worthwhile” for All: Local Tourism, Archaeology, and Sierra de San Francisco Rock Art (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Cruz-Gil.

    This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sierra de San Francisco cave paintings are a hard to access archaeological site in Mexico’s Baja California Sur state. Visiting some of the largest of them requires traversing a canyon on muleback, two nights of camping, and taxing hikes, as well as hiring guides and coordinating with the local National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH)...

  • No Two People Are Alike ... Among the Elk Dancers at Register Cliff (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Radchenko.

    This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As complex archaeological phenomena, rock art images are entangled in numerous relationships of different types, including landscapes, waterways, flora and fauna, past communities, and non-human beings. With the rise of post-anthropocentric archaeologies and the rapid development of rock art research tools throughout the last two decades, our studies...

  • (Re) Visiting Our Relatives: Relating Rock Art Imagery to Other-Than-Human Kin (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Van Alst.

    This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent calls to understand our human experience in relation to the experiences of other than human kin not only have significant implications for how archaeologists understand the past but also for how archaeologists incorporate Indigenous framings of relating to the cosmos in a culturally holistic sense. In this paper, I will explore how the Northwest...

  • Untangling the Roots of Bias: Western versus Native American Thought-Ways in Rock Imagery Research (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Linea Sundstrom.

    This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Approaching Native American rock imagery through the lens of post-Enlightenment Western thought-ways has led to interpretations at odds with Native American thought-ways. To better contextualize Native American rock art and to bring archaeological studies more into alignment with Native American teachings, several of these philosophical differences are...