Images on the Move: Archaic Rock Art of Northern New Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Northern Rio Grande History: Routes and Roots" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaic foragers represent one extreme of the relationship between routes and roots. There is a wealth of evidence in the US Southwest of the itinerant, ambulatory lifeways of ancient populations—impermanent campsites, lithic scatters near likely animal trails and watering holes, and the enigmatic rock art that appears along watercourses or beside points of access through rugged terrain. What remains most visible to us are the concentrations of this art; much more so than the relatively ephemeral remains of habitation or passage. Were these special places, their walls and outcrops endowed with some extraordinary meaning through the engraved artworks? Or did significance already reside there? Clues to the answers to these questions are provided by the images themselves: sinewy patterns of grids and nets, alongside bodies known only by their absence—footprints, handprints, animal prints. In this paper, I argue that the logic of the image was intimately connected to hunting—the same logic that drove the hunt, compelled from the artist a certain kind of engagement with the rock. The apparent fixity of the sites is illusory; far from static subjects for their hammerstones, places and the images that made them were always on the move.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Northern Rio Grande History: Routes and Roots

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32699