Contextualising Great Basin Rock Art: dating symbolic behavior in a changing landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New approaches to the intractable problem of dating rock art" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Volcanic Tableland in the Great Basin houses a rock art province with a wide array of archaeological sites created by First Nations peoples since the Late Pleistocene/Holocene transition. I look at how people in the past situated themselves in the landscape and structured their occupation patterns in the changing landscape.

I use spatial and stylistic analyses to develop a local rock art sequence and relative chronology, and to identify associations between the imagery and other archaeological features. Identified stylistic phases are contextualised with obsidian hydration estimates, projectile points, and environmental phases to identify a potential absolute chronology.

The results show that stylistic and spatial analyses of contextualised rock art are a powerful tool for investigating the structure and organisation of past lifeways. By adding rock art imagery to other markers of past human behaviour, I show the resilience of peoples’ social networks in the face of significant environmental variability and how they adapted the surrounding landscape to suit their occupation needs. The choices people made over c.10,000 years of creating rock art are a strand of evidence that adds a layer of understanding of the social and symbolic structures that are not always readily identified in the archaeological record.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• New approaches to the intractable problem of dating rock art

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51231