In the Morning House: The Redhorn Cycle Depicted in Rock Art from Kentucky

Summary

This presentation reports on a new rock art site from Kentucky, brought to the authors' attention by local citizens. Inside a large sandstone rockshelter, more than a dozen black pictographs show several anthropomorphic characters. These images bear distinctive features and regalia associated with the "Redhorn Cycle" hero narrative reported by Paul Radin in 1948 from his ethnographic work among the Ho-Chunk. The rock art from this "Morning House" strongly resembles well-known Mississippian period paintings from the Gottschall Shelter in Wisconsin and some of the paintings in Picture Cave, Missouri. The similarities include both subject matter and how the images are rendered. Morning House extends the geographic range of the Redhorn rock art corpus to the Eastern Woodlands, east of the Mississippi River.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Methodology and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art   •
• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20192