New Horizons for Southwestern Rock Art

This paper embarks on a journey in Northern New Mexico where there is an abundance of rock art to study. Through the use of personal references and academic literature one gains a greater understanding of the area and the rock art.

Style, considered broadly, is a fundamental tool in anthropological and historical research. Indeed, it is fair to say it is and always has been archaeology's bread and butter, at least in the Greater Southwest. We recognize it-whether explicitly or not-in a wide range of material culture attributes, from the forms and decorations on pottery to the hafting techniques of

Journal of California and Great Basin …, 1983

2023

A small petroglyph site in south central New Mexico is described and its affiliation with other rock art of the area is discussed. An indication of graphic symbology indicative of true writing and the need for a closer look at rock art content is noted. Editor's Note: This is one of the early articles written by John V. Davis during the time when he was researching petroglyphs and pictographs. His three adult children, Kathleen Newman, Jerry Davis, and Jack Davis gave me all of John's research materials. My goal is to post on-line these edited versions for researchers as a reference to his older unpublished or no longer available articles. This is the third of these articles. John's manuscripts will appear as originally written with footnotes about more recent information which might be pertinent. Drawings and photographs may also be added for clarity. The editor may not necessarily agree with the ideas in this article. The article was from Transactions of the Eleventh Regional Archaeological Symposium for Southeastern New Mexico and Western Texas 1976, Midland Archaeological Society. All the of my additions are in italics.

A regional rock art bibliography extracted from the Rock Art Studies Bibliographic Database.

Relating to Rock Art in the Contemporary World: Navigating Symbolism, Meaning, and Significance, 2016

Gjerde, J-M. & Arntzen, M. (eds), Perspectives on Differences in Rock Art, 2021

Jamie Hampson is a Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Department at the University of Exeter. He has a PhD and an MPhil in archaeology from the University of Cambridge, and BA (Honours) in history from the University of Oxford. Jamie works primarily on rock art, identity, and heritage projects in western Australia, southern Africa, and the Greater Southwest USA. His most recent book is 'Rock Art and Regional Identity: a Comparative Perspective'.

The rock art of southern African hunter-gatherers is widely known, though perhaps less for itself than for a «neuropsychological» approach to it that has been emulated by rock art researchers elsewhere. However, a brief historical overview of southern African rock art shows that the insights of George Stow, the founder of research into this art (or suite of arts) in the late nineteenth century has permanently shaped the contours of subsequent work. Some believe that research directions in South African rock art research since the 1980s, relating San arts to shamanic rituals and the neurological functioning of all modern humans, have revolutionized our understanding. In this paper I propose that this alleged explanatory revolution is a product of its time. Revisiting the astonishing, if circumscribed, vision of Stow has the potential to fuel a return of rock art research to a more wide-ranging, expansive and interdisciplinary understanding of the visual arts of the San and their predecessors in prehistory. Keywords: Rock art, George Stow, diversity, interdisciplinarity

A regional rock art bibliography extracted from the Rock Art Studies Bibliographic Database

McDonald/A Companion to Rock Art, 2012

Paintings and engravings on cliffs, boulders, and the walls of rock-shelters and caves often can be better understood by thinking about them with gender in mind. Who made images on stone? What kinds of people do anthropomorphic images represent? More important, what can rock art tell us about the gendered lives and gendered worldviews of ancient peoples? This chapter explores the often complicated gendered dimensions of rock art iconography, technology, style, and landscape placement. All art is gendered, be it images that represent bodies or those that are abstract. Art is gendered by codes of production, who produces it and who consumes it. (Dowson 2001 :321) We can better understand paintings and engravings on cliffs, boulders, and the walls of rock-shelters and caves by thinking about them with gender in mind. Who made images on stone? What kinds of people do anthropomorphic images represent? More important, what can rock art reveal about the gendered lives and gendered worldviews of past people? How might the acts of creating images on stone have shaped gender identities and gendered places? This chapter explores the complicated gendered dimensions of rock art iconography, style, and landscape placement, and points readers to strong case studies of rock art research that attend to gender without projecting present-day gender stereotypes into the past or onto other cultures. SEX AND GENDER Most social scientists distinguish gender from sex. This distinction has problems (Dowson 2001 ; Engelstad 2001), but provides a place to begin thinking critically CHAPTER 12 Engendering Rock Art Kelley Hays-Gilpin 200 KELLEY HAYS-GILPIN about the people behind the imagery as well as the imagery itself. Sex refers to the body-the confi gurations of genitals, hormones, chromosomes, and reproductive functions that we use, in culturally diverse ways, to classify bodies as male, female, and a spectrum of intersex variations. Especially when looking at images rather than bodies themselves, we have to keep in mind that sex categories are socially constructed. Not all cultures divide bodies into the same male/female categories that we might think of as " common sense, " nor do all cultures perceive sex categories as fi xed from birth to death (Yates 1993 :48-52). Gender refers to cultural values inscribed on sex. Gender is an important structuring principle in all cultures, and is more varied and fl exible than sex, both within and among cultures. Gender describes social identities, structures work roles and kinship systems, and can be attributed to non-human entities such as earth and sky, moon and sun, colors and shapes. People often attribute gender to concepts that do not have sex. Gender can be expressed in language, clothing and adornment, art styles, and just about every kind of human behavior. Gender intersects in important ways with age, ethnicity, sexuality, and work roles, so we can never assume that any particular rock art style depicts only two genders. In fact, many cultures have three, four, or more genders for adults, and some consider children to be all one gender until they are differentiated by rites of passage. Identifying depictions of humans and animals is diffi cult enough, taking into account differences in cultural and temporal styles, weathering, and frequent hybrid or composite images in rock art. Identifying sex can be even more diffi cult (Figure 12.1). Did a vertical line between the legs represent a penis or a lizard tail or an item of clothing, such as a fox pelt, breechcloth, or apron? Older rock art studies in Scandinavia classify cupules as symbols of female genitals, but Yates ' s (1993) quantitative study shows that, at least in some sites, half the fi gures with cupules also have penises. Should fi gures without a " penis " or other genitals be classifi ed as male or female, both or neither? Identifying gender is most diffi cult of all because it requires us to look for patterns of association among indications of sex (genitals, body shape), and features that might be gender indicators, such as hair styles, clothing and adornment, tools, weapons, posture, activities, colors, and decorative motifs.