Iconographies of Interaction: Relating Rock Art Images in Western Colorado

Summary

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

North American rock art researchers have long relied on stylistic conventions for identifying the age, cultural association, and, therefore, presumed “meaning” of petroglyphs and pictographs. These categories project archaeological lenses onto Indigenous iconography; when employed at rock art sites baring multiple iconographic “styles”, this approach isolates individual icons from one another based on their assumed origins. Conversely, a relational approach like those advocated for in Indigenous Studies encourages archaeologists to consider the ways that rock art images relate to and interact with the whole of their physical and metaphysical contexts. This includes images on or in the vicinity of a given panel that are ordinarily associated with different Indigenous groups.

In this paper, I take a relational perspective to examining a multi-component rock art site in Dominguez Canyon, Colorado. Drawing from local ontologies related to land use and relationality, I analyze the layering of iconographic forms adjacent to and over one another, and how interactions between images record under-studied aspects of Indigenous history in this region. In doing so, I demonstrate that an over-reliance on discrete, Western categories for identifying rock art images obscures important relationships between individual icons and, thus, the narratives depicted on complex rock art panels.

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): 50942