The Bighorn and Wind River basins of north-central Wyoming and southern Montana have been home to Native American tribes for at least 11,000 years and contain some of the most diverse assemblages of hunter-gatherer rock art anywhere in the world. Most notable are the spectacular and surreal images of the Dinwoody tradition, but there is also a startling array of other forms from shield-bearing warriors to animals, plants, and abstract images. Ancient Visions presents a sampling of these wonderful rock art figures.

Julie Francis and Lawrence Loendorf contend that Native Americans, past and present, hold traditional knowledge that is central to an understanding of these images. By combining the ethnographic record with consultation of traditional leaders in modern Native communities, they offer compelling evidence that highly complex belief systems and religious experience form the context for the vast majority of petroglyphs and pictographs in the region.

The authors also show how this ancient imagery can be integrated with the archaeological record. Modern advances in rock-art dating techniques allow them to begin the process of incorporating image styles with archaeological chronologies. The result is a new approach that offers a much different archaeological picture of the ancient Bighorn and Wind River basins.

Images on rocks depicting birds, serpents, deer, and other designs are haunting reminders of prehistoric peoples. This book documents Missouri's rich array of petroglyphs and pictographs, analyzing the many aspects of these rock carvings and paintings to show how such representations of ritual activities can enhance our understanding of Native American culture.

Missouri is a particularly important site for rock art because it straddles the Plains, the Ozarks, and the Southeast. Carol Diaz-Granados and James Duncan have established a model for analyzing this rock art as archaeological data and have mapped the patterning of fifty-eight major motifs across the state. Of particular importance is their analysis of motifs from Mississippi River Valley sites, including Cahokia.

The authors include interpretive discussions on iconography and ideology, drawing on years of research in the ethnographic records and literature of Native Americans linguistically related to earlier peoples. Their distribution maps show how motifs provide clues to patterns of movement among prehistoric peoples and to the range of belief systems. Rock art is an aspect of the archaeological record that has received little attention, and the art is particularly subject to the ravages of time. By documenting these fragile images, this book makes a major contribution to rock art research in North America.

 

 

Recent decades have seen an upsurge in visitation to rock art sites as well as an increase in commercial reproduction of rock art and attempts to understand the meaning and function of that art within the indigenous cultures that produced it. What motivates this growing interest and what do these interpretations and appropriations of Native American petroglyphs and pictographs reveal about contemporary cultural dynamics? Focusing on the southwestern U.S., this book critically examines the contemporary implications of the interpretation, appropriation, commodification, and management of indigenous rock art.
 
Neither archaeological interpretations nor commercial reproductions of rock art operate in a cultural vacuum. Both the motivation to seek out rock art and the specific meanings attached to it are deeply embedded in narratives about Native Americans already created by anthropologists, archaeologists, photographers, novelists, film and television producers, the tourism industry, and New Age discourse. For those interested in rock art as a window into indigenous cultures of the past, our contemporary projections of meanings are of great concern. Applying the tools of critical/cultural studies to both academic and popular discourse, Rogers explores the implications of such projections for rock art studies, contemporary gender dynamics, and the neocolonial relationship between Euro-Americans and Native Americans.