The Soundscapes of Baja California Sur: Preliminary Results of the Arroyo de San Pablo Rock Art Canyon

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.

When the first Spaniards arrived in the Baja California Sur the area of the Arroyo de San Pablo in the Sierra de San Francisco was populated by the Cochimi people. It has been argued that at least for the latest Holocene the archaeological record is connected with the groups that inhabited the area. It is possible, therefore, that the rock art that was painted in the many canyons in the Sierra de San Francisco was created by them. Yet, radiocarbon dates have produced dates as early as the 6th millennium BCE. In this paper we would like to reflect on whether the ethnohistorical information about the communities living in the area when Spaniards arrived can inform us about the religious world in which the paintings were produced. Through this analysis we particularly would like to understand the way in which sounds may have helped Cochimi people to enhance the effect of the paintings and compare this with the results obtained by our archaeoacoustic tests in the Arroyo de San Pablo undertaken in March/April 2018.

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)

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26339