Brushstrokes of the Past: Unraveling Pecos River Style Murals with Harris Matrix Composer

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Stratigraphic analysis has long been a cornerstone of archaeological research, and the practice of displaying and analyzing complex relationships between stratigraphic surfaces and layers using Harris Matrix Composer is commonplace. New methods in rock art research have incorporated an understanding of stratigraphy in the analysis of paint layers. As a part of the ongoing Hearthstone Project, archaeologists at Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center (Texas) have analyzed the paint layers at 10 Pecos River Style (PRS) rock art sites and created Harris Matrices to graphically display the complex stratigraphic relationships revealed by this analysis. Doing so reveals novel issues that arise from using software designed for layers of sediment on rock art. With that said, using Harris Matrix Composer in this manner to differentiate between distinct painting events allows us to argue that PRS murals were primarily rendered during a single painting event as a composition rather than separate painting events accumulated over time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38967.0