Great Basin Rock Art: Archaeological Perspectives

1. Integrating Rock Art with Archaeology: Symbolic Culture as Archaeology

Rock art is currently enjoying something of a boom in public and archaeological interest, although in North America its study and practice still occur predominantly outside the world of academic and professional archaeology. Only a handful of doctoral dissertations are written each year on the subject. It is largely absent from academic curricula, and only a very small number of professional archaeologists specialize in it. Symptomatic of this professional disinterest and neglect is the large number of amateur archaeologists who make important contributions to the study of rock art, despite lacking formal qualifications in archaeology or anthropology. In some regards this situation mirrors the early history of archaeology as a discipline, when amateurs dominated the field and the subject was entirely absent from university campuses. Yet archaeology’s exclusion from academia was relatively brief compared to that of rock art, for the exclusion of rock art studies from North American academic institutions shows no immediate signs of ending—though there has been sporadic archaeological interest since the days of Garrick Mallery (893), and Great chapter 1 Integrating Rock Art with Archaeology Symbolic Culture as Archaeology angus r. qu in l an 1 Basin rock art attracted the attentions of no lesser a figure than Julian Steward (Steward 929, 937). Curiously, a critical retrospective of Julian Steward’s career (Clemmer et al. 999) mentions his engagement with rock art only in passing, as if it were a kind of hobby, separate from Steward’s anthropological career. The separation between academic archaeology and the study of rock art has had important consequences for the way in which the field is conceptualized and the state and quality of theory building. Rock art can appear to be highly distinct, its study demanding specialized interpretations and theories that have little purchase in other fields of archaeology. Rock art can be minimally defined as non-utilitarian intentional human-made markings on rock surfaces (Bednarik 200:3–32), a definition incorporating paintings, engravings, and scratchings, made on boulders, rimrocks, cliff edges, and cave ceilings and walls. Thus, a rock art “site” is essentially a collection or assemblage of images made on natural rock surfaces. Because of rock art’s landscape context, its imagery has never been treated the same way as imagery placed in constructed structures. Instead, rock art has been treated rather like other non-utilitarian archaeology, as the residue of past ritual practice. Archaeological approaches to ritual are rarely explicit about how ritual spaces are identified. Those that have been explicit about their methodology have used the presence of symbolism to infer a ritual function for the archaeological contexts in which it occurs (Renfrew 985:24). In such cases the objects identified as functioning as religious symbols (and thus as an index of ritual practice) tend to be nonutilitarian (Quinlan 993:98). Therefore, since rock art constitutes assemblages of symbolism, it is not surprising that it tends to be naturally associated with the spiritual sphere in archaeological thinking. Reflecting this tendency, rock art (once its cultural authenticity was accepted) was first theorized as having being used in rituals of hunting magic (Breuil 952; Heizer and Baumhoff 959, 962; Reinach 903) and more recently as sources of shamanistic powers and records of trance states (Clottes and Lewis-Williams 998; Lewis-Williams 2002; LewisWilliams and Dowson 988). Yet these theories are unique to rock art and have rarely been applied to other ritual contexts encountered by archaeologists (though for a recent attempt to extend the shamanistic model to other kinds of ritual archaeology, see Price 200). 2 g r e a t b a s i n r o c k a r t i n t e g r a t i n g r o c k a r t w i t h a r c h a e o l o g y 3 Although the defining property of rock art (imagery made on natural rock surfaces) is unique, in other regards it is not so divorced from other types of archaeology. In particular, the distribution of rock art is not always specialized, and it frequently occurs in association with settlement archaeology , such as lithic scatters, house rings, hunting blinds, and so on, as many of the chapters in this volume illustrate. Whether these other kinds of archaeology are considered an integral part of a rock art site depends to a large extent on...