New Research into Environmental Contexts of Southeastern Rock Imageries

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.

Rock imagery can be found across the globe, but research on this topic is still widely segmented by present political boundaries. In this study we transcend boundaries at the state level in the southeastern United States to better recognize and analyze patterns of rock imagery types and their environmental contexts across the region. To do so we created a database of rock imagery sites in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia and then conducted spatial analysis in ArcGIS Pro and statistical analysis using R. We found that patterns of imagery types and environmental contexts do emerge across the Southeast in ways that provide insight into the potential uses of these sites. We suggest that studies of rock imagery can provide a window into what was important to people in the past and can draw attention to indigenous histories in a region where they have widely been erased or ignored.

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): 36530.0