Table of Contents
Preface
AN ENCOUNTER WITH ROCK-ART can stop you in your tracks. Its presence confirmswith startling clarity and intimacyan exciting truth that is sometimes forgotten: Both in wilderness areas and in the midst of our cities, people were here before us. On the very spot where you stand looking at rock-art, someone from a different era and culture once stood creating it.
Why were the marks made? For what purposes? Why were they placed in this particular location? What do the designs signify? Who made them, and when? The more you ponder, the clearer it becomes that even the simplest questions surrounding rock-art are surprisingly difficult to answer.
Tens of thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs have been made in many different settings across the Southwest. You might come across them in the backcountry, at a national park, or even in your own neighborhood. At some sites, designs are bold and prominently situatedelsewhere, they are tiny and concealed in hidden places. They may be delicately pecked into dark boulders, painted in dramatic colors on vast cliff walls, or created as giant-sized figures on the ground. Technique is sometimes rough and rudimentaryand sometimes it is the work of a skilled and practiced hand. Imagery may be identifiableor utterly enigmatic. Rock-arts quantity, variety, and beauty are astonishing.
THIS BOOK is for anyone whose imagination has been captured by these intriguing markings. In jargon-free language, it addresses the questions most frequently asked about Southwestern rock-art. A wide range of basic information is covered, common misconceptions are clarified, controversial interpretations are discussed, and emerging new ideas about rock-art are explained.
Rock-Art of the Southwest: A Visitors Companion also shows you how to think about rock-art in new ways and gain more from your experience as a site visitor. Practical guidelines for minimum-impact site visits, along with information on how to report vandalism, are included in the discussion of rock-art protection. A directory section points the way to a number of outstanding Southwestern sites, and an annotated resources section lists local and national rock-art organizations, research centers, and a selection of informative Web sites.
Your explorations of rock-art in the Southwest may take you into magnificent canyons, along ancient trails, and into other settings of awe-inspiring beauty. Your experiences and enjoyment will be greatly enriched as you increase your knowledge and understanding of rock-art and of the people who made it. Above all, we hope that heightened awareness and appreciation will motivate you to take an active role in protecting this irreplaceable cultural heritage of the Native American Southwest.
Introduction
ROCK-ART STUDY IN THE SOUTHWEST TODAY is a lively and dynamic field. Exciting avenues of research are being explored, wide-ranging interpretations of evidence are under discussion, and even the subject of exactly how to study rock-art stimulates debate.
Although petroglyph and pictograph sites in the Southwest have been investigated throughout the last century for a variety of purposes, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that systematic research began in earnest. Thus, the field is young, and to better understand the developing state of current knowledge, it is helpful to review the background out of which rock-art study in the Southwest has grown.
Garrick Mallery (whose Picture-Writing of the American Indians was published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1893) was one of the fields pioneers. Mallery saw Native American petroglyphs and pictographs as a primitive form of writing. He believed that the study of rock-art could help explain how written language began. Although Mallerys underlying premise that cultures evolve from barbarism to civilization is no longer accepted, his rock-art descriptions and the extensive information he collected from regional authorities remain useful data for researchers.
Beginning in about the 1920s, discrete rock-art styles began to be identified in the Southwest. It was recognized that petroglyphs and pictographs at some sites looked very similar to those at other sites, and that rock-art could be classified based on its design elements and the techniques used to make it. The identification of rock-art styles marked the beginning of associating rock-art with particular cultural traditions. Defining and studying styles remains central to Southwestern rock-art research.
By the 1960s and 1970s, rock-art documentation had become the focus of fieldwork efforts. Many rock-art sites were clearly jeopardized by construction projects, vandalism, and other impacts of population growth in the booming Southwest. The development of meticulous site-recording procedures and the refinement of data-collection methods mark this era. The urgency of documentation and preservation work has by no means lessened today, and techniques surely will continue to be improved into the future.
The 1980s and 1990s were a period of intensified interest in the expertise of Native Americans. Living experts were consulted, and the ethnographic literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was reread with fresh appreciation. Value was seen not only in what Native Americans know about ancient rock-art from their tribes oral histories and traditions, but also in the role of rock-art in contemporary Native American culture. The unique knowledge and perspective that Native American authorities bring to the study of rock-art remains crucial to any comprehensive understanding of the subject.
At the opening of the twenty-first century, issues both old and new define Southwestern rock-art study. Can it be determined with certainty why rock-art was created? What do individual designs signify? Can rock-art be accurately dated? Is the work of individual rock-art makers identifiable? These and other questions will fuel the research and analysis of Southwestern rock-art for years to come.
A STUBBORN PROBLEM has frustrated Southwestern rock-art researchers for decades, however. Despite wide awareness of rock-artand despite rock-arts ubiquity and remarkable level of preservationit has resisted easy incorporation into systematic studies of the Southwests prehistory.
The fact that rock-art is so difficult to date is at the heart of the problem. It is notoriously tricky to determine the age of most rock-art using standard archaeological dating techniques, and the results of most analyses raise as many questions as they answer. To add to the problem, rock-art is rarely part of a sites stratigraphy, the sequential layers of deposits used in modern archaeology to determine sequences of events. Thus, it has been difficult for archaeologists to integrate rock-art into their investigations of particular prehistoric sites, or to connect it with the people who lived in a place at a specific point in time.
