(Re) Visiting Our Relatives: Relating Rock Art Imagery to Other-Than-Human Kin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent calls to understand our human experience in relation to the experiences of other than human kin not only have significant implications for how archaeologists understand the past but also for how archaeologists incorporate Indigenous framings of relating to the cosmos in a culturally holistic sense. In this paper, I will explore how the Northwest Plains rock art sites with elk imagery and women-made motifs are related to local Indigenous conceptions of more than human kin, including plants, elk, and waterways. By exploring the relationship between rock art images and landscape features, we can better understand the meaning of the images and how they relate to broader ecological and cultural landscapes. Using a relationality framework to synthesize archaeological research, environmental data, and Indigenous relationality scholarship, elk rock art imagery in the Northwest Plains can be part of a larger world of elk knowledge inclusive of multidisciplinary scholarship frameworks and more traditional understandings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• (Re) Imagining Rock Art Research

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50941