Rock Imagery, Cultural Landscapes, and Indigenous Ontologies in the North American Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How we frame the study of rock imagery (i.e., petroglyphs and pictographs) conditions the types of questions we ask, the types of data we employ, and ultimately the types of conclusions we draw. In the North American Southwest, the study of rock imagery has long focused on the images, less so on the rocks, and only rarely on the landscapes in which it exists. This is due largely to a heuristic bias that prioritizes the interpretation or decipherment of the imagery that all too often results in ambiguous or self-proving inferences. New lines of inquiry are looking beyond the mere images to ask how the Southwest’s Indigenous communities use rock imagery in social and spiritual dialogues with themselves, neighbors, ancestors, and deities. These approaches generally couple analytical and digital methods and techniques germane to landscape archaeology with ethnographic information on relevant Indigenous ontologies pertaining to land, spirit, being, power, history, and morality—a blending of formal and informed methods. We illustrate examples of this fledgling Southwestern focus with case studies from southwestern Colorado and southern Arizona.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40037.0