From the high plains of Canada to caves in the southeastern United States, images etched into and painted on stone by ancient Native Americans have aroused in observers the desire to understand their origins and meanings. Rock paintings and engravings can be found in nearly every state and province, and each region has its own distinctive story of discovery and evolving investigation of the rock art record. Rock art in the twenty-first century enjoys a large and growing popularity fueled by scholarly research and public interest alike. This book explores the history of rock art research in North America and is the only volume in the past twenty-five years to provide coverage of the subject on a continental scale. Written by contributors active in rock art research, it examines sites that provide a cross-section of regions and topics and complements existing books on rock art by offering new information, insights, and approaches to research. The first part of the volume explores different regional approaches to the study of rock art, including a set of varied responses to a single site as well as an overview of broader regional research investigations. It tells how Writing-on-Stone in southern Alberta, Canada, reflects changing thought about rock art from the 1870s to today; it describes the role of avocational archaeologists in the Mississippi Valley, where rock art styles differ on each side of the river; it explores discoveries in southwestern mountains and southeastern caves; and it integrates the investigation of cupules along Georgia’s Yellow River into a full study of a site and its context. The book also compares the differences between rock art research in the United States and France: from the outset, rock art was of only marginal interest to most U.S. archaeologists, while French prehistorians considered cave art an integral part of archaeological research. The book’s second part is concerned with working with the images today and includes coverage of gender interests, government sponsorship, the role of amateurs in research, and chronometric studies. Much has changed in our understanding of rock art since Cotton Mather first wrote in 1714 of a strange inscription on a Massachusetts boulder, and the cutting-edge contributions in this volume tell us much about both the ancient place of these enduring images and their modern meanings. Discovering North American Rock Art distills today’s most authoritative knowledge of the field and is an essential volume for both specialists and hobbyists.

Product Description: Once a stepchild of archaeology, rock art research has become increasingly important tool in recent archaeological work for understanding the symbolic and ideological systems of ancient peoples. Yet, methods of working with pictographs, petroglyphs and geoglyphs are rarely taught in a systematic fashion...read more

Human actions are often deeply intertwined with religion and can be understood in a strictly religious context. Yet, many volumes and articles pertaining to discussions of religion in the archaeological past have focused primarily on the sociopolitical implications of such remains. The authors in this volume argue that while these interpretations certainly have a meaningful place in understanding the human past, they provide only part of the picture. Because strictly religious contexts have often been ignored, this has resulted in an incomplete assessment of religious behavior in the past. This volume considers exciting new directions for considering an archaeology of religion, offering examples from theory, tangible archaeological remains, and ethnography.

Product Description: While there has always been a large public interest in ancient pictures painted or carved on stone, the archaeological study of rock art is in its infancy. But intensive amounts of research has revolutionized this field in the past decade...read more

Product Description: Whitley, an archaeologist specializing in the study of prehistoric art and religion, interprets the symbolism of California's ancient rock art that ranges from complex polychrome cave paintings and deeply incised designs on basalt canyon walls to large earthen figures along the terraces of the Colorado River...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This Reader in Archaeological Theory presents sixteen articles of key theoretical significance, in a format which makes this notoriously complex area easier for students to understand. This volume: * provides an intellectual history of different approaches to archaeology which contextualizes the complex traditions of cognitive archaeology and postprocessualism on which it focuses * organizes theories of archaeology, the meanings of things, the prehistoric mind and cognition, gender, ideology and social theory and archaeology's relationship to today's society and politics * includes lucid section introductions to each section which provide context, explain why the papers are so significant and summarize their key points * emphasizes research from the 'New World', making archaeological theory especially relevant and accessible to students in North America...read more

Product Description: This Reader in Archaeological Theory presents sixteen articles of key theoretical significance, in a format which makes this notoriously complex area easier for students to understand. This volume: * provides an intellectual history of different approaches to archaeology which contextualizes the complex traditions of cognitive archaeology and postprocessualism on which it focuses * organizes theories of archaeology, the meanings of things, the prehistoric mind and cognition, gender, ideology and social theory and archaeology's relationship to today's society and politics * includes lucid section introductions to each section which provide context, explain why the papers are so significant and summarize their key points * emphasizes research from the 'New World', making archaeological theory especially relevant and accessible to students in North America...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The contributors to this volume discuss a series of these technical, methodological and substantive issues in the analysis of hunter-gatherer rock art. Principally emphasizing North America, the contributions provide summaries of advances in the dating of pictographs and petroglyphs, and interpretations of the art using ethnohistorical, iconographic, stratigraphic, and compartative data, with approaches informed by symbolic, semiotic, and gender studies...read more

Product Description: In Spanish with Chapter Summaries in English.