The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I

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 "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Rock art is enigmatic and iconic, its visual aesthetic used across academia to promote everything from book covers to merchandise, but beyond this, rock art is undervalued for the contributions it can make and the knowledge it can provide. Current rock art research is interdisciplinary, drawing methods from various fields and knowledge form multiple lines of evidence. These approaches augment and enhance rock art documentation, offer new strategies for evidence, site management, and facilitate new interpretive insights for rock art provinces around the world. With continuing, innovative, and progressive methods of analysis, documentation and study, rock art is moving into a new era of research, enabling it to not just support endeavours, but lead in them. The Rock Art Interest Group sponsored session provides a forum to share rock art research and pedagogy, highlighting and showcasing current research to promote the value of rock art to the wider academic community.

Other Keywords
Iconography and epigraphy • Digital Archaeology: 3D Modeling • Digital Archaeology: Photogrammetry • Worldwide

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)
Documents
  • The Anakuakala Pictograph (Kiʻi Pakuhi) from Hawai‘i Island: A Contextual and Comparative Assessment. (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Scheffler.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The 2014 eruption of Kīlauea Volcano prompted the emergency survey of a cave in the Puna District of Hawaiʻi Island. The survey recorded several kilometers of cave passage including stacked rock structures, midden, and also a distinctive feature in the form of a...

  • Archaeometric Analysis of Pigments, Cueva Higuerillas Rock Art Site (Sonora, Mexico) (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Beatriz Menéndez Iglesias.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cucurpe is in northwestern Sonora (Mexico), in the lower foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental. The region is characterised by rock art in small caves and rock shelters of volcanic tuff with a higher concentration of paintings than engravings. During the recording of...

  • Beyond the Stereotype: Working to a Landscape-Based Model of Study and Cross-Cultural Exchange, Fluteplayer Rock Art Imagery in Chaco Canyon—Concluding Research Results (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlotte Vendome-Gardner.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Fluteplayer is widely recognised within rock art, characterised by a figure holding and/or playing a flute it has been miss-interpreted, appropriated, and widely commodified as the Kachina Kokopelli. As a result of this Fluteplayer imagery is now entangled with...

  • The Canaima Complex: Uncovering New Rock Art Sites and Cultural Insights in Canaima National Park, Venezuela (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Roger Swidorowicz.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study reveals the discovery of previously unknown rock art sites in Canaima National Park, southeastern Venezuela, some of which are associated with lithic artifacts, and examines their cultural significance. The research places these findings in context by...

  • Learning to See: Rock Art, Cave Art and Stone Landscapes in Pennsylvania (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Mayhew.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, rock art has been only a footnote to Pennsylvania’s below ground archaeology. As a result, more enigmatic aspects of the cultural landscape, including cave art and stone landscapes, were either overlooked, not looked for at all, or dismissed because they...

  • Linking Rock Art and Archaeology: A Case Study from the Southwestern Sierra Nevada Foothills (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Micah Hale.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diverse rock art has been recorded at archaeological sites in Yokohl Valley, Tulare County, California. A confidential private development was proposed for the Yokohl Valley, serving as the impetus for the identification and recordation of rock art that is associated...

  • Mimbres Influence on Iconographic Expression from the Mimbres Heartland to a Cultural Border Region (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Faithleigh Podzimek.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our project conducts a comparative analysis of Mimbres-style petroglyphs located in the heartland of the Mimbres River Valley, NM to those found in a cultural border region of the Chiricahua and Pinaleño Mountains in southeastern Arizona. The Mimbres heartland...

  • Pictograph Scenes that compare to Tabira Black and White Pottery (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Loendorf.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists use depictions on pottery for comparison to pictographs and petroglyphs. Most common are Mimbres images that occur at rock art sites, but Chupadero Black and White pottery designs can also be comparable. Recently we have found several pictograph panels...

  • Re-examining Maya Rock Art at Planchón de las Figuras, Chiapas, Mexico: Documentation of Petroglyphs with Close Range, High Resolution Photogrammetry and Relief Visualization (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Whittaker Schroder.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya are well-known for their sculptures in stone, most prolific during the Classic period (AD 250–800); what Gordon Willey and Robert Redfield once called “great styles” or “great traditions,” respectively. More recently, archaeologists have investigated other...

  • Rethinking the Function of Rock Inscriptions, from Northeast Africa to Southeast Asia (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Iman Nagy.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cross cultural comparative rock art research that incorporates local perspectives is scarce. This research is a reflection of fieldwork conducted at two sacred sites in two culturally distinct regions, in Northeast Africa and Southeast Asia, where the practice of...

  • Spatial Variability of Red Linear Pictographs in the Lower Pecos (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerod Roberts.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study employs geospatial analysis to explore the distribution and variability of Red Linear style pictographs in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas. The examination of 614 Red Linear anthropomorphs across 25 sites reveals distinct regional patterns, including an...

  • Stoneworking in the Southern Zone: An Initial Study of Costa Rican Petroglyphs and their Implications for Pre-Columbian Human-Landscape Interaction (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Ruf.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southern Costa Rica is home to several hundred petroglyphs displaying anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and geometric motifs. While some depict concrete scenes, others seem to represent abstract images that have been difficult to interpret thus far. Various theories have...

  • A Tripartite Approach for Determining Tribal Affiliation for Petroglyphs and Rock-borne Imagery (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Moretti-Langholtz.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Global interest in petroglyphs and rock-borne imagery is arguably at an all-time high as evidenced by scholarly publications, online interest groups, and conferences dedicated to the topic. Methodological approaches to the preservation, conservation, interpretation and...

  • The Value of Rock Art: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis at Paint Rock, Texas (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Amezcua.

    This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our investigation explores the North American motifs of the Mississippi Valley Hero Twins present at Paint Rock, Texas. Because this story has morphed into myriad versions through ritual transfer of polity to polity, we are outlining the iconographic linkage to that to...