Central Wyoming Rock Art and What it Reveals about the People Who Used this Region

Summary

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

Central Wyoming is surrounded by distinctive rock art styles — Dinwoody to the west, Plains Ceremonial and Biographic to the east, and styles south into Colorado previously attributed to Fremont, Ute, and Comanche. Presence of these distinctive styles locally demonstrates that people responsible for those styles diverged from what we consider their primary homelands and geographically overlapped in the central part of the state. Thus, rock art sites in central Wyoming are viewed not only from the perspective of how they relate to each other but to other sites outside the region. The sites indicate how diverse external groups utilized and spent time here, either contemporanously or at different times, and how they and their belief systems are represented and presumably interacted.

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 II

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52052