The Boulder Glyphs: An Analysis of Prehistoric Conflict and Historic Ranching Lifeways along the Big Bend of the Rio Grande

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Located in the Sierra Vieja breaks, a subset of the Chihuahua Desert near the Rio Grande in far west Texas, are fields of thousands of small vesicular boulders and survey work found some contain petroglyphs. Beginning in the fall of 2018 the Center for Big Bend studies led a thorough investigation and documentation of over 200 petroglyphs pecked into these basalt boulders. The petroglyphs include anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures, abstract enigmatic designs, and historic brands and initials. The variability in iconography suggests the petroglyphs were made by both prehistoric and historic individuals, offering the opportunity to study a time transgressive phenomenon not reported from the region and with few corollaries outside of the area. The most common themes depicted on the boulders are indigenous intergroup conflict and historic brands. Geospatial analysis indicates patterns in the dataset, and using both ethnographic and historic county records, adjacent site data, and metal detecting has helped form and initial interpretation for these localized petroglyphs. This poster will discuss the preliminary analysis of these boulder glyphs, including the common themes of the images, spatial patterns, and records research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33277