The Persistence of Presence in the Rock Art Traditions of the Great Lakes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While recent scholarship has fruitfully considered the importance of Indigenous ontological commitments (e.g., to power and place) in the creation of rock art, notions of presence as a discrete component of an image’s being remain underexplored. In this contribution, I seek to examine these notions as distinct from representational logics in their emergence within relational ecologies and qualities of action. Yet despite their ephemeral, distributed, and dynamic properties, notions of presence can also be understood as persistent in the way they continually provoke – whether by guiding the creation of panels in the past or in facilitating understandings of rock art in the contemporary present. In this way, investigating the persistence of presence is not about iconographically documenting veiled and static meanings across time and space but about recovering the interactive conditions through which presence was and can still be conceived. Rock art from the Great Lakes, particularly the petroglyphs of Kinoomaagewaabkong, near what is now Peterborough, Ontario, and Ezhibiigaadek asin in what is now the Sanilac Petroglyphs Historic State Park (Michigan), provide the case studies for exploring these ideas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38336.0