Medicine dog; medicine baboon: images of horses perceived by contact cultures in rock art.

Summary

Horses traveled when Europeans expanded across the globe and thereafter swiftly spread among indigenous groups on those continents colonized. The way they are portrayed in rock art can potentially tell us much about the nature of the entanglements of contact and the groups both bringing and adopting this hugely influential domestic animal. This paper draws on rock art evidence from South Africa, Australia, North and South America. Indigenous portrayals of the horse are sometimes conflated with other animals and, far from being the product of bewilderment or misunderstanding, it transpires that often the artists well understood the horse, but in terms that were familiar to them.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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