Shamanic Images in Rock Art in Siberia: Global Theory and Regional Peculiarities

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Southern Siberia is the home of unique images of shamans, some of which show specific associations with rock surface features, notably fissures. In my previous research, I analyzed one such image from the Minusinsk Basin; namely, from the site of Ilinskaya Pisanitsa (Cambridge Archaeological Journal 2017). In this presentation, I will show new, previously unpublished research that shows that associating images of shamans with cracks does indeed present a pattern. The question remains, however, is this a universal pattern in Siberian shamanic rock art? It will be suggested that linking images with cracks may be related to a specific ritual context and should not be expected to be a universally occurring feature in shamanic rock art imagery. These observations appear valuable not only for the Siberian context but also for the broader theory of shamanic rock art, including the North American research, where the association of images (interpreted as shamanic) with cracks has often been noted.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36231.0