The Value of Rock Art: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis at Paint Rock, Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Our investigation explores the North American motifs of the Mississippi Valley Hero Twins present at Paint Rock, Texas. Because this story has morphed into myriad versions through ritual transfer of polity to polity, we are outlining the iconographic linkage to that to that of the Lower Mississippi Valley because it contains North American motifs such as shape shifting of Hero Twins into birds (turkeys), the play of a deadly game of ball (i.e. chunkey), and strong symbolism of death, decapitation, the sun, and four-petaled flowers (related to Datura and the tobacco plant). Based on linguistic analysis of indigenous polities of the region, we believe that some of the design elements that we see at Paint Rock suggest that there is a cosmological allegory that transfers sacred power through the rock art and captures the ritual practices of the region and of its people. The second part of the investigation will explore concepts of rebirth through analysis of solar interactions with the pictographs at Paint Rock.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• The Value of Rock Art: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Current Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis, Part I

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52023