Search

In this ground-breaking study the author looks at three consecutive styles of rock art, placing them in the social context in which they were produced. Although necessarily succinct, the argument shows that as hierarchy increased and functioned over longer distances, rock art could perform as the organ of pastoralist authority, or the badge of marginalised hunters or, most often, as the imagery of consensus masking social inequality. Keywords: Chile, Atacama Desert, Archaic, Early Formative, Late Formative, fifth to second millennia BP, social interaction, rock art, Introduction The Atacama Desert is located in the north of Chile and extends 600km from the Loa River to the Copiapo River (Figure 1). It is the driest desert in [...]

Serious research on rock art has historically been neglected by most North American scholars mainly because of the enigmatic nature of the chipped and painted images. Many of the new investigative and interpretative techniques in rock art research have come from overseas specialists who consider most rock art as purposefully created pictorial records. US researchers are increasingly embracing this attitude in employing international methods to scrutinize rock art located in the western hemisphere.

Samples of organic matter and rock varnish from seven rock-art sites in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming and Montana were collected for dating purposes. Petroglyphs sampled include Dinwoody-style figures, shield-bearing warriors, and other well-known Plains rock-art motifs. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of 10 petroglyphs yielded dates from the Early Archaic to the Protohistoric periods. A strong numerical relation between varnish leaching and time was found for petroglyphs older than 1,000 years, permitting the derivation of a cation-leaching curve (CLC) and calibrated cation-ratio (CR) ages for 15 different petroglyphs. No clear numerical relation between varnish leaching and time was found for petroglyphs less than 1,000 years old, possibly due to historical damage or past environmental conditions. As a result, calibrated CR ages could not be derived for six petroglyphs, and they are considered to be only younger than 1,000 years. Although further research is needed to establish whether one CLC can be used for all petroglyphs in the region, these studies constitute the first numerical chronology for rock art in the Bighorn area. Results indicate the occurrence of spatially discrete, but temporally concurrent styles in the Bighorn Basin during the last 800-900 years., During the past 10 years, there has been a renewed interest in the study of rock art among North American archaeologists, partially prompted by Old World archaeologists who have developed […]