Out From the Center: Rock-Art of the Chaco World

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.

Chaco Canyon contains multitudes of petroglyphs and pictographs, yet rock art has not been a prevalent line of evidence in the archaeological study of that pre-contact culture. More than 15,000 Ancestral Puebloan elements attest to the importance of the role of iconography within the canyon. And the Chaco World extended far beyond what today is called Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Certain Chacoan architectural components found in more than 230 habitation sites outside the canyon - including great houses, great kivas, roads, and earthworks - are used to identify those sites as related to the Chaco Center. Rock art has not been identified as a Chacoan trait. But data for more than sixty known outlier communities indicate that 23 contain rock art imagery. As no single trait is found at every outlier, and trait frequencies generally don’t exceed one third of all sites, the presence of rock art imagery at 10% of great house communities containing other Chacoan traits could indicate iconographic relationships and trends both temporally and regionally. Polly Schaafsma’s great gift to rock art research includes her ability to recognize the big pictures of the past. This paper touts rock art imagery as a viable line of evidence in the study of Chaco on a Polly-esque scale.

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): 22852