Images-in-the-Making: Process and Vivification in Pecos River Style Rock Art

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico are home to one of the most sophisticated and compositionally intricate rock art traditions in the world—the Pecos River style. This style is characterized by finely executed, polychromatic figures woven together to form mythic narratives. Artists depicted and vivified the actors in these narratives by means of semantically charged attributes, such as color, paraphernalia, and body adornments. However, also integral to image-making and equally charged with meaning is the mural’s placement on the landscape, its interaction with the rock surface, the interplay of light and shadow, the order in which artists applied paint to the wall and modifications made to painted image through incising and rubbing. By analyzing these aspects of the image-making process we can begin to identify choices made by the artist in the production of the art. These choices reflect the framework of ideas and beliefs through which the artists interpreted and interacted with the world. Images-in-the-Making will demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach using examples from Pecos River style rock art.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• The Art of Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23297