Utah Rock Art Research Association |
Uintah Conference Center: 313 East 200 South, Vernal, UT September 29 - October 3, 2022 |
Agenda Click here |
Keynote Speakers: Carolyn Boyd is the Research Director and founder of a nonprofit corporation, Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center (www.shumla.org). She serves as Adjunct Professor at Texas State University and as Research Fellow at the Center for Arts and Symbolism of the Ancient Americas in San Marcos, Texas and the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory in Austin. Boyd received her doctorate in archaeology from Texas A&M University based on her analysis of the 4,000 year-old rock art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico. She is the author of Rock Art of the Lower Pecos, published in 2003 by Texas A&M University Press and The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative, available through the University of Texas Press in the fall of 2016. She has been published in numerous peer reviewed journals, such as Antiquity, American Antiquity, Latin American Antiquity, Revista Iberoamericana de Lingüística, and Archaeometry and has contributed chapters in several edited volumes. Boyd teaches Field Methods in Rock Art, a three-week field school offered through Texas State University, gives numerous lectures around the country and abroad, serves on graduate committees, and is the Principal Investigator for the Lower Pecos Border Canyonlands Archaeological Project. Her presentation will be: The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos The prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created some of the most spectacularly complex, colorful, extensive, and enduring rock art of the ancient world. Perhaps the greatest of these masterpieces is the White Shaman mural, an intricate painting that spans some twenty-six feet in length and thirteen feet in height on the wall of a shallow cave overlooking the Pecos River. Boyd will build a convincing case that the mural tells a story of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time—making it possibly the oldest pictorial creation narrative in North America. Unlike previous scholars who have viewed Pecos rock art as random and indecipherable, Boyd will demonstrate that the White Shaman mural was intentionally composed as a visual narrative, using a graphic vocabulary of images to communicate multiple levels of meaning and function. Drawing on twenty-five years of archaeological research and analysis, as well as insights from ethnohistory and art history, Boyd will identify patterns in the imagery that equate, in stunning detail, to the mythologies of Uto-Aztecan speaking peoples, including the ancient Aztec and the present-day Huichol. This paradigm-shifting identification of core Mesoamerican beliefs in the Pecos rock art reveals that a shared ideological universe was already firmly established among foragers living in the Lower Pecos region as long as four thousand years ago. Alan Gold (Garfinkel) is a California and Great Basin anthropologist/archaeologist principally known for his work with the indigenous people of the Far West and for his studies of Native American rock art in California and the Great Basin. He has been recognized for his pioneering studies in regional prehistory of eastern California, the far His presentation will be: Myth, Ritual and Rock Art: Decorated Animal People and Animal Masters of the Coso Range One of the more spectacular expressions of prehistoric rock art in all of North America is the petroglyph concentration in the Coso Range of eastern California. These glyphs have played a prominent role in attempts to understand forager religious iconography. Four decades ago, Heizer and Baumhoff (1962) concluded that Great Basin petroglyphs were associated with hunting large game and were intended to supernaturally increase success in the hunt. Similarly, in their seminal work Grant et al. (1968) concluded that the mountain sheep drawings of the Coso region bolstered the hunting magic hypothesis. However, this hypothesis has become increasingly marginalized by a prevailing view that considers most rock art as an expression of individual shamanistic endeavor (cf. Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1988; Whitley, 1994; Whitley and Loendorf, 1994). This presentation explores comparative ethnologic and archaeological evidence supporting (in a fashion) the hunting magic hypothesis. Garfinkel places this explanatory framework in a larger context based on a contemporary understanding of comparative religion and the complexity of forager symbolism.Garfinkel concludes that Great Basin rock art drawings may simultaneously represent both the source of supernatural power and the dream and trance world that gave access to it: the Master of the Game Animals. He attempts to develop a multilayered structure of interpretation tailored to the representations of what a shaman (ritualist, trancer) experiences and describes and what he or she has been socialised to expect, in terms of Native cosmology and one that models; mythology, ritual and religious tenets providing the material for understanding the altered state experience and the rock drawing pictures. |
PO Box 511324, Salt Lake City, UT 84151-1324 |