Religious Symbolism In Eastern California Ghost Dance Rock Paintings

Summary

There exists multi-colored, historic Native American rock paintings found throughout eastern California. In a minimum of 21 locations, Native, indigenous, polychromatic rock paintings have been documented that apparently date to a time period between 1870 and 1900 (Schiffman et al. 1983; Garfinkel 1978, 1982, 2005, 2007). These rock painting sites exhibit subject matter that may relate to revitalistic religious movements popular during this short 30 year time frame. Such paintings have been described and detailed analysis provided as a basis for asserting that they relate specifically to Native American Ghost Dance religious observances.

The present discussion provides more extensive and systematic analysis attempting to show how the element composition of one of the largest and most elaborate of these sites is a visual representation of an overall cosmology informed by Numic religion and Ghost Dance ontology (Goss 1972; Hittman1997, 2014; Hultkrantz 1986; Vander 1997).

Specifically, it appears that certain paintings in eastern California exhibit elements of Numic cosmology and Ghost Dance religion manifesting central ideational themes through their subject matter, use of certain colors, animal attributes, spatial arrangement of figures and order of color applied - reconstructed via superimposition.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Rock Art Research: A Regional Analysis   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage