Arkansas
Archeological Survey Wins NEH Award to Study Rock Art
Across the State
The Arkansas Archeological Survey — a unit of the University of Arkansas System — has been awarded a $175,000 grant from the Collaborative Research Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a three-year study of prehistoric and protohistoric rock art in Arkansas. The project, titled “Rock Art and the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex,” will be the first comprehensive attempt by Arkansas archeologists to place rock art within a regional framework.
Dr.
George Sabo III is project director, assisted by Jerry Hilliard, Michelle
Berg Vogel, and several other Arkansas Archeological Survey staff members.
Dr. Jon Russ and Sarah Spades of Arkansas State University and Dr.
Marvin Rowe and Karen Steelman of Texas A&M University are project
collaborators who will conduct geochemistry studies to determine the
ages of selected rock art images.
Our approach considers rock art sites as components of a “cultural landscape” that also includes other site types such as ceremonial mound centers, villages, camps, and natural landscape features used by or considered important to local human groups. By detailed study of the art motifs themselves, combined with landscape data, we hope to identify different types of rock art sites and to explore their functions within the cultural system that created them. As an interpretive context for much of the art, we look to the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), a late prehistoric religious manifestation widespread throughout the Southeast.
Rock art consists of paintings and carvings—called, respectively, pictographs and petroglyphs—on natural rock surfaces such as cliff faces and the walls of caves. It is found throughout the world as an ancient and enduring form of imaginative or expressive activity by human beings. Many people today have heard of the famous Paleolithic cave paintings of the Dordogne region in France, but fewer are aware that American Indian rock art is widespread across this continent, and fewer still may realize that Arkansas possesses one of the richest concentrations of rock art in the southeastern United States. In 2000 the Arkansas Archeological Survey began a project to update and systematize the information on rock art in its site files. Helped by a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council, a computer database for rock art and an educational “Rock Art in Arkansas” website were created. The new NEH-funded project will build on these achievements and expand the geographic scope of the Survey’s rock art research.
Detailed mapping of rock art sites, using state-of-the-art computerized mapping technology, will provide data for a study of environmental context, to see if different site types can be identified according to geographic and “cultural landscape” criteria such as accessibility, proximity to other resources, orientation to the cardinal directions, “viewscapes", and other factors. This phase of the project is designed to demonstrate that different kinds of rock art were produced in different behavioral contexts and for different purposes, some practical (such as trail and boundary marking), some cultural (such as storytelling), and some sacred (such as mortuary rites, vision quest rites, and shamanic rituals celebrating the community’s connections to the spirit world).
One reason why Arkansas rock art has received little systematic attention by archeologists in the past is the difficulty in dating it and thereby placing it within a cultural framework. That began to change in 1995, when Survey archeologist Jerry Hilliard led excavations at The Narrows in Crawford County, where tools used to create the painted petroglyphs at the site were unearthed in a datable context. This allowed Hilliard to assign the art to a cultural phase of the late prehistoric Mississippi period.
Part of the new NEH award will be used by the Arkansas State and Texas A&M University participants to carry out direct dating through geochemical analysis of the pigments used to create pictographs. These techniques have been applied successfully at rock art sites throughout North and South America, and recently at a site in Missouri where an 11th century A.D. date was obtained for a pictograph representing a “horned serpent” motif that is common in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Direct dating of images is extremely important in building an index of temporal reference points within the whole body of rock art images, but it is not possible to date all rock art in this way. Not only are the techniques expensive; they can only be used in conditions where organic compounds are preserved in the pigment.
Another way to provide cultural context for rock art is by relating the images to other embellished artifacts from known cultural phases that can be independently dated by radiocarbon and other techniques. In Arkansas, the similarity of certain rock art images to Southeastern Ceremonial Complex iconography has long been noted, but little has been done to explore the connection. The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex was a system of American Indian religious beliefs and institutions found throughout the region during the Mississippi period, roughly A.D. 1000 to 1500. Elaborate depictions of supernatural themes including composite beings (bird-men, snake-men, winged serpents), circle-and-cross motifs, and various sky world motifs such as sunburst and bird figures, were produced on decorated pottery, stone tablets, engraved shell, and embossed copper as part of this system. Participating cultures also built ceremonial flat-topped earthen mounds surmounted with special-purpose buildings that served as the focal points for community rituals. This project will be the first time rock art has been recognized as a significant component of SECC manifestations and interpreted as a part of that Complex.
A world-class collection of SECC-related artifacts from the famous Spiro site in eastern Oklahoma is housed at the University of Arkansas Museum and constitutes an essential source of comparative information for the successful completion of this project. Most of these artifacts were acquired by the Museum during the 1930s—which underscores the fact that proper curation with professional handling and record-keeping ensure the long-term viability of Museum collections as research tools. Fortunately, these collections are housed in a facility that will remain accessible to Survey researchers.
A final note of urgency is the fact that many rock art sites have badly deteriorated over the past several decades due to vandalism, air pollution, and other causes. For this reason, one phase of the project will be to continue updating the site files, especially with several forms of high-quality graphic documentation to preserve a record of the art for future research and enjoyment.
The Arkansas Archeological Survey has eleven research stations around the state, eight of them at various university campuses, two at archeological state parks, and one at Blytheville. The Survey’s Coordinating Office is at the UA agricultural campus in Fayetteville. Dr. George Sabo heads the Survey’s UAF research station. The Survey already maintains a website about Arkansas rock art (http://arkarcheology.uark.edu/rockart), and a short book on rock art is now available in the Survey’s Popular Series. Results of the NEH-funded project will be distributed via several traditional and new media publications targeted for general audience and classroom use as well as the academic community.
