Cultural Landscapes and Migrations in Sandstone Canyon, Southwestern Colorado through Pueblo and Ute Rock Art

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sandstone Canyon, located within the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in southwestern Colorado, is one of the biggest canyons of the area. Since 2014 four sites with large rock art panels, previously unknown, have been found in the area. Depictions of rock art at these sites have been initially dated from around the third/fifth century A.D. to the thirteenth century A.D. (Pueblo and possibly Fremont cultures) and to the appearance of the ancestors of the Ute Indians in this area. The petroglyphs depict mostly single geometric motifs and other symbols like the bear paw, individual figures of people and animals, and extended scenes that include fighting and also hunting of large animals, mostly deer, bison, and bighorn sheep.

This paper will answer questions of the chronology and cultural affiliations of particular rock art panels, and shed new light on settlement continuity and change, including migrations from one region to another by farming Pueblo societies, as well as hunter-gatherer Ute societies and later Euro-American explorers, settlers, and cowboys passing through the canyon with cattle at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth century and who left their initials, names, and dates on almost every panel of rock art.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25047