TALLIES IN ROCK ART REVISITED:

Station 16, Jeffers Petroglyph Site, Minnesota. 

Internet photograph, public domain.

Many instances of tallies have been identified in rock art. It is often assumed that any panel that has repetitive elements is a tally. There is another sort of count that I believe we should also be aware of – a register. There are many nuances to the meanings of both terms but, for the purposes of this paper, I am going to use the following definitions.

Tally - "A continuous record or count of a number of things or people." (Cambridge.org)

Register - "A list or record of acts, events, etc." (dictionary.com)

Hopi Clan Registry, Willow Springs, Arizona. Photograph Paul and Joy Foster.

So a tally is a count of items, and a register is a count of events or occurrences. For example, the Hopi Clan Registers at Willow Springs, Arizona, are not tallies by these definitions, but lists of events - the event being a visit by a member of a clan to Willow Springs. These have been interpreted because members of the Hopi Clans have provided testimony explaining them. The meanings of other tallies and registries are much more problematical however.

In the photograph above (top of page), from the Jeffers Petroglyph Site in southwestern Minnesota, Rauff (2013, 2015) identifies the dots as tallies because they represent a count of something.

Awl sharpening grooves with petroglyphs and tallies, Purgatory Canyon, Bent County, Colorado. Photograph Peter Faris, 9 July 1998.

Some rock art enthusiasts designate ranks of tool sharpening grooves as tallies because of their groupings. I see many of those groupings as coincidental; the grooves are in the same place because that rock is particularly good for sharpening a bone or antler awl, or because there is a comfortable rock in front of it to sit on while working, etc. I also question many of them because the depth is excessive, much deeper than necessary to make a simple tally notation. There are, however, sites where tool sharpening grooves are lined up like tally marks, and accompanied by other clues such as other tally seeming notations and other petroglyphic images deeply engraved or pecked. This site from the Purgatoire River in southeastern Colorado exhibits all three; tally-like markings, deeply engraved petroglyphs, and tool or awl sharpening grooves. This opens up the possibility that the grooves really may have been intended as some sort of tally.

“There are essentially two approaches to interpreting tallies that have not been explicitly identified by their makers. The first is to uncover a structural isomorphism between the count and grouping of tallies and that of some natural phenomenon. Marshak made use of this technique in postulating astronomical counts in tally marks on Paleolithic bones.” (Rauff 2013:83)

“The second approach is a kind of cultural triangulation that attempts to match the tally marks with identifiable objects or events that are culturally associated with the rock art. Merrell, for example, believes that the tallies in the Lava Tube Cave petroglyphs in Idaho ‘denote cave visits or perhaps represent caches of meat stored in the caves’ (p.36). As another example of this second approach consider the tally marks that are known as part of the vertical series.” (Rauff 2013:84) While there may be tally marks in Lava Tube Cave I seriously doubt that they represent caches of meat stored in the caves. First, why would you use a permanent mark to represent a temporary resource? And second, I do not believe that the people who cached the meat supply would then leave a sign announcing it to all and sundry. I believe they would have wanted to protect that knowledge.

Vertical Series rock art, southwest Montana.

Keyser and Klasses, 2001, fig. 16.6, p. 286. 

Among the rock art that strongly suggests that it represents tallies is the Vertical Series Tradition of the Northern Plains. “The rock art of the Vertical Series Tradition is among the most enigmatic and intriguing on the Northwestern Plains. It consists mostly of repeated nonrepresentational symbols arranged in multiple vertical columns or series – the characteristic that gives this tradition its name. The repetition of simple geometric shapes and their consistent arrangement into rows or columns gives the strong impression that they are part of a structured system of communication. Perhaps these symbols form an incipient ideographic notation system – an early precursor to true writing.” (Keyser and Klassen 2001:281)

In other words, perhaps the number of the symbols represents an aggregate number of things and the shape of the symbol represents the thing being counted.

"Music," Purgatoire Canyon, southeast Colorado. Photographs Peter Faris.

Some sets of symbols carved into the cliffs if the Picketwire River in southeast Colorado consist of a long horizontal line with shorter vertical lines appended vertically beneath it, each short, vertical line terminating in a pecked circle. Dubbed “music” by the locals, these signs somewhat resemble signs described in Garrick Mallery’s report as notation of passing time. In his report “Picture Writing of the American Indians”, Garrick Mallery gave the following description of time notation by the Dakota tribe.

Year tally, Garrick Mallery, fig. 182, p. 265.

“Dr. William H. Corbusier, surgeon, U.S. Army, gives the following information: ‘The Dakotas make use of the circle as the symbol of a cycle of time; a small one for a year and a large one for a longer period of time, as a life time, one old man. Also a round of lodges or a cycle of seventy years, as in Battiste Good’s Winter Count. The continuance of time is sometimes indicated by a line extending in a direction from right to left across the page when on paper, and the annual circles are suspended from the line at regular intervals by short lines as in Fig. 182.’” (Mallery 1893:265)

Hicklin Springs, 5BN7, Colorado. Field drawing, Peter Faris, 26 September 1992.

Also from southeastern Colorado is this panel from the Hicklin Springs site, 5BN7, in Bent County. James Rauff included it in his 2015 paper as his figure 14 misattributing its source, having picked it up from a publication which had also misattributed it. This is, in fact, my drawing of the panel from a rock art recording project in 1992. Rauff notes the dot patterns and defines them as tallies. “A similar complex is shown in Figure 14, and archaic petroglyph from southeastern Colorado. The regularity in the dotted grids suggests that the dots were pecked into an intentional pattern with, perhaps an intentional count.” (Rauff 2015:17) There are indeed many other dot patterns at 5BN7, and some of them may well be tally counts.

Baca County, Colorado. Photograph Peter Faris, February 1996.

Finally, I want to again bring up the line groupings so often interpreted as Celtic “Ogam” by amateur epigraphers in the southeastern Colorado/western Oklahoma area. While some of these petroglyphs may resemble Celtic Ogam, to me they exhibit the characteristics of tallies more, and for the purposes of this analysis I so designate them.

Along with the question of which rock art represents a tally and which is just a pattern or design is the question “a tally of what?” In most cases I believe this is just not definable – the production of rock art being a very subjective process tallies very seldom include the necessary clues. They are, however, another sign that the people who produced it thought and felt like us, they are another sign of our common humanity.

NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.

PRIMARY REFERENCES:

Keyser, James D., and Michael A. Klassen, 2001, Plains Indian Rock Art, University of Washington Press, Seattle.

Mallery, Garrick, Picture Writing of the American Indians, in Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnography to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-1889, by J. W. Powell, Director, Government Printing Office, Washington DC., reprinted in two volumes in 1972 by Dover Publications, Inc. New York.

Rauff, James V., 2013, Rock Art Tallies: Mathematics on Stone in Western North America, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 76-88, July 2013.

Rauff, James V., 2015, Mathematical Ideas In North American Rock Art, paper presented at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, San Antonio, Texas, Janluary 2015.

SECONDARY REFERENCES:

Merrell, Carolynne L., 2007, Lava Tube Dave Pictographs in the Great Rift of Southeastern Idaho, in American Indian Rock Art, Vol. 33, Don D. Christensen and Peggy Whitehead, eds. American Rock Art Research Association, Phoenix, AZ. Pages 27 – 40.