Rock Art in Northern Sonora between Stones and Pigments: Preliminary Archaeometric Analysis

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.

Sonora has a great concentration of rock art in North America. In order to advance in the analysis and documentation of the rock art groups, the project “Cave Documentation and Patina Study in Northern Sonora” was proposed, focused on Cucurpe (Sierra Madre Occidental) and Caborca (Sonoran Desert). The project’s objectives are rock art documentation, the application of new technologies, and the analysis of desert varnish. The archaeometric analysis will be a basic component of this project. Pigment samples were collected in one of the cave assemblages of Cucurpe, Cueva Higuerillas, where the aim is to determine both the composition of the pigments based on optical microscopy, XRF, and SEM analysis. Furthermore, the analysis of the desert varnish, from the analysis of microstructures, will provide information about how these patinas are formed, their composition, and the possible paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the context, putting it in relation to the rock art of the site. For the analysis of varnish, we rely on samples collected in different locations in the region—streams and hills—associated with rock engravings. Preliminary archaeometric analyses obtained from the pigments and desert varnish are presented here.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36449.0