Even
though the navigational button that probably brought you to this page says "Rock
Art," this term is a misnomer. The ancient imagery archived here is not "art"
in the sense that contemporary Western culture considers it. Petro-pictography
("rock-picture-writing"), paleography, or even epigraphy might be more
correct. Whatever one calls these signifiers, they certainly are not art for art's
sake. Instead they are a form of writing with its own idiosyncratic grammar and
usage. For instance, the Hopi word tutuveni refers to petroglyphs (rock
carvings) or pictographs (rock paintings); however, the same word also denotes
books, magazines, newspapers, or any written material. This dual designation clearly
puts the form of communication in the same conceptual realm as the Egyptian or
Mayan hieroglyph and the Chinese ideogram.
"In most works concerned with these mysterious markings, the term
rock writing is seldom applied to them, in spite of the fact that this
is the very term the Indians themselves have always used, and would thus seem
to be the most appropriate one.... This omission is due largely to the fact that
most scholars have never accepted the premise that these markings were indeed
writing. The existence in the languages of many Indian tribes of a word
for writing (in the sense of recording information for others to read) proves,
at least that picture writing was long accepted as writing by the Indian. And
who but the American Indian himself is more qualified to say whether it is or
is not?"
LaVan Martineau
The Rocks Begin to Speak
(Las
Vegas: KC Publications, Inc. 1994,1973)
"Recent theories for
the study of rock art and other archaeological materials have emphasized the roles
played by context and symbolism. It has been proposed that symbols such as rock
art images are most likely to be meaningful when examined within the contexts
of time, place, culture, and society and with the knowledge that symbolism is
part of information exchange, communication systems, and acts to express and reinforce
group identities."
Sally Cole
Legacy On Stone: Rock Art of
the Colorado Plateau and Four Corners Region
(Boulder, Colorado: Johnson
Books, 1995, 1990)
"These images pecked into or painted on
stone are a valuable component of the archaeological record-- graphic images that
often derive from the various aspects of prehistoric cosmologies and mythic systems.
Some prehistoric ideologies of the Southwest have been carried into the ethnographic
present by the modern descendants of the prehistoric peoples, but other such systems,
with the exception of what can be learned through the visual imagery of the petroglyphs
and rock paintings, have been almost totally lost. Rock art, then, is an important
means of reaching some understanding of the sacred dimension and certain related
practices of the prehistoric period."
Polly Schaafsma
Indian
Rock Art of the Southwest
(Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1995,
1980)
Grapevine Cayon (Nevada)
