James D. Keyser - Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau

Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau

A Samuel and Althea Stroum Book

Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau

JAMES D. KEYSER

University of Washington Press Seattle London

Douglas & McIntyre Vancouver/Toronto

This book is published with the assistance of a grant from the Stroum Book Fund, established through the generosity of Samuel and Althea Stroum.

Copyright 1992 by the University of Washington Press
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Audrey Meyer
96 95 94 93 92 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Press
P.O. Box 50096
Seattle, Washington 98145-5096
Douglas & McIntyre
1615 Venables Street
Vancouver, British Columbia V5L 2H1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencePermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keyser, James D.
Indian rock art of the Columbia Plateau / James D. Keyser.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-295-97197-5 cl.
ISBN 0-295-97160-6 pbk.
1. Indians of North AmericaColumbia PlateauArt. 2. Rock paintingsColumbia Plateau. 3. PetroglyphsColumbia Plateau. 4. Indians of North AmericaColumbia PlateauAntiquities. 5. Columbia PlateauAntiquities. I. Title.
E78.C63K49 1992
979-7dc20

91-27353

CIP

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Keyser, James D.
Indian rock art of the Columbia Plateau
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55054-051-3 (Douglas & McIntyre).
ISBN 0-295-97160-6 (University of Washington Press)
1. Indians of North AmericaColumbia PlateauArt. 2. Rock paintingsColumbia Plateau. 3. PetroglyphsColumbia Plateau. 4. Indians of North AmericaColumbia PlateauAntiquities. 5. Columbia PlateauAntiquities. I. Title.
E78.C63K49 1992a
709.0113089970797 C92-091306-7

Contents

Illustrations

Maps

Figures

Preface

I SAW MY FIRST INDIAN ROCK painting in western Montana when I was nine years old. My father had heard of the site several years before, and finally agreed to take an eager son who had just become fascinated with American Indians and their history. I still remember the experience: I marveled at the red painted deer that covered the rock wall and wondered what the nearby tally marks meant. To look at these pictures and to realize that they were painted before European Americans came to Montana was heady stuff for a boy who had just read about the Indian wars, Custer, Fort Fetterman, and the Wagon Box Fight.

During the next ten years, I visited several more sites in western and central Montana, usually on family outings. Then I entered college, and began studying archaeology, and found the library to be a treasure house of books and articles about rock art across the United States and around the world. I read everything I could find on the subject and scoured professional journals for the few articles concerning the rock art of my home state. In 1974, when I got the chance to do archaeological field work, I began my first rock art research project: recording the pictographs of western Montana, including the site that had sparked my interest fifteen years before. Imagine my joy upon learning that the site was even more impressive than I had remembered, and in finding two other sites nearby. That summer, a colleague and I visited most of western Montanas thirty sites.

As I did the research for a professional journal article about these paintings, I read or reread dozens of the available publications on rock art. There were two basic sorts of publications. Most common were simple descriptive works with page after page illustrating various paintings and carvings, but without answers as to why or when the art was made. A few professional publications interpreted rock art, but for most people these explanations were obscured by clouds of jargon, statistical comparisons, and references to scholarly works not readily available outside of university research libraries. A few notable books, especially those by Campbell Grant (1967) or Selwyn Dewdney and Kenneth Kidd (1967), were different in providing plenty of good illustrations combined with readable, informative text. But these books had little or nothing about Columbia Plateau rock art, and Grants national overview, Rock Art of the American Indian, didnt report even one of the sites I had just finished recording! In passing, I thought how sad it was that no book existed about these paintingsor about any of the many others that I had learned of in neighboring states and Canadian provincesthat not only pictured the art but also went much further to tell who made them, why, and when.

I finished the article on western Montana pictographs and moved on to other subjects in archaeology, including rock art in other areas. In the intervening fifteen years I have written many of those articles filled with jargon, charts, and statistics, attempting to describe this art to other professional colleagues and to discern the who, why, when, and what that would help explain it. I have had fun doing this, and I have traveled throughout the northern Great Plains, the Columbia Plateau, and even to Europe to conduct my research. I have been fortunate in having had the opportunity to do much of this research in the course of jobs with universities and government agencies in both the United States and Canada.

Throughout my career, however, I have never forgotten my initial interest in rock art and my disappointment that so few publications had both good illustrations and answers to my many questions. Likewise, I have been conscious that much of my research has been funded by public support to preserve and study these prehistoric relics. In the past few years I have spoken to numerous public groupsfrom grade-school classes to historical societiesin an attempt to make more information about rock art available to the lay public, and thus to give something back to the people who ultimately support my research. This book is one more way that I can offer something about this subject to those who are interested. I hope it reaches everyone who has ever thought, Why did they do these drawings? What do they mean? Maybe some young person will read the book and find in its pages the same fascination that I found in that Montana pictograph thirty years ago.