Rock Art

Overview

Rock art can be found all over the desert Southwest. Imagery consisting of petroglyphs, elements that have been carved, pecked, rubbed or scratched into the surface of the rock and pictographs (sometimes called rock paintings), elements that have been drawn, daubed, spattered or painted onto the rock using various natural pigments in monochrome (single color) or polychrome (multi-color), can be found in the walls of caves, canyons, on boulders, in bedrock and sometimes on the floors of caves.

Categories of Rock Art

Southwestern rock art is divided into two categories, representational and abstract. Elements within the representational can include: anthropomorphs (human-like), zoomorphs (animal-like; reptiles, birds, bats, and other creatures) hand prints, and plant-like images. Abstract designs can include spirals, dots, circles, ladder-like forms, sunbursts, “squiggles”, “wheels”, and mazes to name a few. Individual panels, or rock art sites, can be comprised solely of elements from one or the other categories or a mix of both.

Styles

As a result of rock art studies too numerous to discuss here, rock art has been divided into several "styles" based on cultural phase or time period, geographic region, method of execution, subject matter and attributes. Bearing in mind that any one, or sometimes more, of these components may overlap other style boundaries, i.e. hand prints may appear in both Archaic and Anasazi sites, one can visit a rock art site and approach it with a basic understanding of when it was made and who made it. For more detailed, technical information about the different rock art "styles", read Sally Cole's Legacy on Stone; 1990, and Polly Schaafsma's Indian Rock Art of the Southwest; 1980. Rock art styles found in the Colorado Plateau and Four Corners region have been defined as Archaic, Anasazi, Fremont and Historic Indians or Native Americans of the Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountains. The Archaic style can be further "broken down" to include the Glen Canyon Style 5, Barrier Canyon, Uncompahgre, and Interior Line styles. Styles within the Anasazi change through time as you move from the Basketmaker phases to the PIII. Applying a style to one rock art site is not always a simple task.

Examples:

Archaic (Abstract) Anasazi (Representational) Fremont (Representational)

Interpreting Rock Art: What does it mean?

Rock art was, and still is, created for many purposes by the indigenous people of the Colorado Plateau and Four Corners region. Sites dating from the Archaic hunter-gatherer peoples to modern Native Americans can be found across the Southwest. Rock art may have served to identify cultural differences, record celestial events, or was used for communication. Certain rock art sites are known to have been used for seasonal time-keeping. Archaeologists and ethnographers are confident that there are rock art sites or elements that reflect a religious or spiritual purpose, or have symbolic meaning. However, when it comes to definitively interpreting prehistoric rock art images archaeologists, historians and even modern Native Americans can only speculate as to what they mean because prehistoric rock art exists outside of living cultural context.

Archaic (Abstract)	Anasazi (Representational)	Fremont (Representational)