Patterned Pictographs: The Rock Imagery of Eagle Nest Canyon in a Regional Context

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The rock imagery of Eagle Nest Canyon (ENC) is well known to many archaeologists and canyon visitors, especially at three sites: Eagle Cave, Kelley Cave, and Skiles Shelter. However, six additional rock imagery sites within ENC and adjacent tributaries are infrequently visited but still provide important contributions to the overall corpus of pictographs in the ENC vicinity. This paper provides a brief summary of nine rock imagery sites stewarded by the Skiles family using data collected during Shumla’s Alexandria Project. Second, we discuss the research potential of comparing prominent iconographic elements from ENC sites to the larger regional Alexandria dataset. Our analysis uses iconographic observations and panel imagery from the Alexandria database to explore the attributes of speech-breath, rabbit ear headdresses, and antlered anthropomorphs. This data synthesis demonstrates not only iconographic connections between ENC rock imagery sites and other Lower Pecos Canyonland (LPC) sites, but it also shows that some ENC sites have unique graphic expressions of certain elements. This paper demonstrates the diversity and importance of the painted imagery within Eagle Nest Canyon as well as the utility of the Alexandria Project database for future regional rock imagery studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Eagle Nest Canyon, Texas: Papers in Honor of Jack and Wilmuth Skiles   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38288.0