Search

Red Bird was a Cherokee murdered at the Red Bird River Petroglyph site (15Cy51) and buried at the Red Bird River Rockshelter (15Cy52) during the late eighteenth century, where he left an important record of traditional petroglyphs. His legacy is key to understanding the origins of Sequoyah’s Cherokee Syllabary and its relationship to rock art. Personal testimonies of Red Bird’s descendants are supported by primary documents and archaeological evidence, including the letters of Sequoyah’s maternal uncle, John Watts, and prototypes of Cherokee Syllabary characters engraved at 15Cy52 in 1808, when members of Sequoyah’s matrilineal family resided nearby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite new arguments by Tankersley and Weeks that we misinterpreted petroglyph engravings and ignored site formation processes at the Red Bird River Shelter in Kentucky (15CY52), we remain convinced that there is no evidence for Cherokee Syllabary writing at the site. The petroglyphs are clearly not symbols present in any version of the Cherokee Syllabary. There is no empirical evidence for any site formation processes that have altered the shelter or its petroglyphs in the ways they suggest. There is still no evidence that Sequoyah ever spent any time in the vicinity of Red Bird River Shelter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reanalyzes petroglyphs from the Red Bird River Shelter (15CY52), a small sandstone shelter in Kentucky. In 2009-2013, it was claimed that some of the carvings at the site represented the earliest known examples of Cherokee Syllabary writing, dating to the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It was also suggested that Sequoyah, the Cherokee artist and intellectual who invented the Cherokee Syllabary in the early nineteenth century, had made these petroglyph versions during a visit to see his white paternal family living in Kentucky. Our reanalysis categorically contests this interpretation. We do not see Cherokee Syllabary writing at Red Bird River Shelter. We do not believe that historical evidence supports the notion that Sequoyah had white relatives in Kentucky whom he visited there at the time required for him to have authored those petroglyphs. We also believe that this account misrepresents Sequoyah's Cherokee identity by tying him to white relatives for whom there is no historical warrant. We argue that the Red Bird River Shelter is a significant precontact petroglyph site with several panels of line-and-groove petroglyphs overlain by numerous examples of modern graffiti, but there is no Sequoyan Syllabary inscription there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many researchers have studied prehistoric European art, there has been virtually no attention paid to the broad prehistory of art as a specialized form of material culture; virtually all studies focus narrowly on single bodies of art. This paper presents a new approach to analyzing prehistoric art: quantitative deep time study. It analyzes a database of 211 art traditions from across Europe and from 40,000 B.C. to 0 A.D. to identify changes in the amount, nature, and use of prehistoric art. The results reveal clear long-term trends. The amount of art made increased sharply with the origins of sedentary farming and continued to rise throughout prehistory. New forms of art arise in conjunction with new ways of life; "period genres" are closely tied into patterns of social change. There are also long-term shifts in aesthetics and the uses of art (such as a gradual shift from arts of ritual and concealment to arts of surface and display). These results, though preliminary, show that a deep-time approach familiar from topics such as climate change is applicable to art; the resulting social history can illuminate both art and its social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new cognitive model is proposed and applied to the analysis of the anthropomorphic-dominated paleoimagery or rock art of both the Archaic Barrier Canyon Style and the Basketmaker San Juan Style of the Colorado Plateau, including the attributes of headdresses and messengers. Under the cognitive model, the decision to execute rock art is culturally and historically conditioned: the interaction of narrative language and visual imagery takes precedence over hallucinatory and trance mechanisms. The cognitive model examines the interplay between perceptual imagery and stored mental imagery, both of which occur within the human cognitive system. Such an interplay arguably has been as important in the shaping of human cultures as the role of language. These Archaic and Basketmaker ecologies and cultures also may have developed group ritual, an early adoption not requisitely tied to the transition from a mobile hunter-gatherer ecology to an agricultural ecology. Such interpretations redefine the predominant images of the region's Archaic and Basketmaker anthropomorphic figures, bird-headed imagery, messenger spirits, supplication panels, and processional panels. The model reinstates the praejudico role that visual imagery plays in the construction of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a multivariate statistical and spatial analysis of rock art site content and composition for the Didima Gorge, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in presenting an experimental set of methodological approaches, the paper attempts to identify categories of rock art sites based on their image content and other archaeological characteristics, and then explores how these types might have related to various social, religious, and economic contexts in the past. The paper finds evidence far three kinds of rock art site use in the Didima Gorge: (1) large residential "home bases" that were centers of economic activity, (2) large unoccupied sites that were special locations for ritual activities, which the paper argues were sometimes the locations of puberty initiation, and (3) small isolated sites that were locations of private magical activities done by lone individuals. The central theme of this study is that there is clear evidence for diversity in terms of the contexts in which rock art sites in the Didima Gorge formed, and that no single account is adequate for their explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]