THE MEANING OF ROCK ART

Many Native American tribes have used rock in a wide variety of ways. In Southern Arizona rock art is found on most mountain buttes. The Native Americans believed that high butte tops were spiritual places. And they believed that crevaces in the rock were where spirits entered the real world and went into the underworld. In Arizona there are both petroglyphs - pecked into basalt,limestone, and sandstone - as well as pictographs - painted rocks in caves, on cliffs, and mountains with charcoal, red ochre, and other paints.

The new theory by David Whitley is that the rock art is only several hundred years old in the US vs. other debates that thought it was a thousand years old. One archaeologist from UCLA interviewed several southern Californian tribes to determine rock art is not that old. However most shamans use it to communicate directions to a water area, places where they have vision quests, and special rock art is drawn for fertility of the earth and for their crops and for more babies.

In California there are only about 200 such rock art sites. I have discovered only several as an archaeologist. Many still lay beneath the moss on rocks. I have visited many of the rock art sites in northern and southern California and have recorded many in South Dakota where the Plains Indians lived. Many of the paintings are throughout the western US. I used to belong to the ARARA and gave a paper on Sears Rock site - one of the largest ceremonial sites in the US.

Many rock sites are ceremonial sites where people danced and sang- we definitely found dance floors with shrine sites at Sears Point. In South Dakota where I worked with the Archaeological Research Center we found many rock art sites at the southern edge of Hot Springs. We did not include them in our research but we photgraphed some. I also went to the Coso Range rock art when I gave a talk on Sears Point. These drawings are of large ceremonial figures that represent shamans and are painted with red ochre. It is a very interesting place to visit. Fortunately the Coso Range site is protected within a Naval Weapons Base so you have to have permission to visit them.

Petroglyphs can be assigned as stylized, naturalistic, or geometric. Stylized are a design pattern based according to a particular region. Naturalistic are designs that represent animals, people, fish or reptiles. Geometric are designs that are concentric circles, scrolls, diagonals, or mazes.