Rock Art, Hunting, and Life

Summary

Archaic rock art in the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico demonstrates an intimacy with the ecologies of which it is a part, from the microscopic life with which it shares its surfaces, to the talus slopes it occupies or watches over. Knowledge of materials and the ecological processes with which they were thoroughly entangled encouraged hunters to lay down tracks and traces of their own, including the geometric patterns and animal and bird prints that constitute the archaic rock art tradition of the area. The rock art appears as either isolated, often barely visible, communications with the heavily patinated basalt surfaces on which it is pecked; or as sites that are made up of the dense iterative marks left by itinerant hunters, marks that transformed boulders, reshaping them in line with the natural ecologies of which they are a part. Through a consideration of several sites investigated by members of the Gorge Archaeological Project in the light of recent work on ecology and hunter-prey relations, this paper examines the ways in which rock art exists on a continuum with other, older practices, rather than being indicative of a moment of radical separation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20638