Making the Walls Talk: Rock Art and Memory in the American Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past few decades, memory has become a topic of prominence in archaeological research. While iconography has long been seen as revealing social practices of the past, rock art has typically been neglected in memory-related literature, a gap in scholarship that is particularly notable in the American Southwest, where hundreds of thousands of rock art images have been recorded. In this paper, I synthesize iconographic, geospatial, and ethnographic evidence to understand the ways that memory is visible in rock art at Baird’s Chevelon Steps, an Ancestral Puebloan site in northeastern Arizona documented by the Arizona Archaeological Society and the Rock Art Ranch Field School. I argue that the rock art practices performed at this site, particularly those related to engagement with and manipulation of ancestral imagery, offer insights into how the sites’ residents incorporated the past into their ongoing process of identity formation. By integrating multiple lines of evidence, archaeologists can productively interpret the ways that memory is embedded in and facilitated by rock art and advance our understandings of the relationship between memory and identity in the Southwest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22976