(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research

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.