Back in 2011 I posted a column titled “Bighorn Sheep Petroglyphs – Groceries or Metaphor?” on RockArtBlog. This was to argue against LaVan Martineau’s nonsense in his book “The Rocks Begin to Speak” that bighorn sheep petroglyphs were actually metaphors for travel. My evidence (aside from common sense) was that not only are there many rock art images of bighorn sheep with arrows sticking in them, but also that an Alibates flint knife from Baca County, Colorado, had proven to have bighorn sheep blood on it when tested for blood protein residues by Dr. Richard Marlar.
At that time I wrote that “Back in the 1980s I was invited to speak about rock art at a meeting being held in the town of Springfield in southeastern Colorado. As part of the presentation I was talking about bighorn sheep petroglyphs which are very common in that area. I don’t honestly remember exactly what I was saying about them, but I was rudely interrupted from the floor by someone who stood up and loudly proclaimed that LaVan Martineau had solved the question of bighorn sheep petroglyphs. ‘They are a metaphor for travel. The clues needed to understand their meaning are that the length of the legs represents the distance to be traveled, and the contour of the belly of the sheep represents how rough the country to be crossed is. Bighorn sheep petroglyphs with a deeply rounded belly show the contour of the country to consist of deep valleys, in other words rough country with plenty of mountains and valleys to cross.’(Martineau 1973).” (Faris 2011)
Hunters Shelter with panels marked, New Mexico. , From Billo, Mark and Greer, 2011, Figure 4, page 53. The butchery scene is Panel A.
A 2011 paper (which I had not seen at the time of my previous column) by Billo, Mark, and Greer presented pictograph panels from two different sites in the Guadalupe Mountains of Southern New Mexico which include scenes of anthropomorphs butchering deer, in other words suggesting that animal portrayals are indeed groceries, not metaphors. These scenes are painted in a general geographical designation that they call the Pecos Miniature Style. These are intimately related to the pictographs known as the Red Linear Style (RLS). “Late Archaic rock art known as the Red Linear Style (RLS) in the Lower Pecos River region of Texas, 400 km to the southeast (Mark and Billo 2009). Attributes of the Guadalupe imagery, such as size, body shape, hairstyles, tools, animals, nets, interaction between figures, general overall action, and technology of the paintings, show a strong similarity between pictographs at Hunters Shelter, White Oaks Spring, and other sites in the mountains.” (Billo, Mark, and Greer 2011:49) (The 400 km cited in the above quotation equals 230 miles.)
The first panel is in
Hunters Shelter. “Hunters shelter is a 4 x 4 meter room-like shelter (Figure
2) high on a steep slope of an interior canyon back in from the eastern
escarpment and commands a view of the valley below.” (p. 52) They
designated three panels in the interior on the back wall of this space.
“Panel A, the deer butchering panel (Figure 5), is a unified scene that depicts a specific event or refers to a specific action, story, or concept. The scene covers an area 20 cm wide, 15 cm tall, and extends from 44 cm. above the floor. Seven people surround a reclined deer on its back and presumably dead. Six of the people, with weapons set aside on the ground, work on the deer. Three hold the legs, one holds the tail, and the remaining two are in the body cavity apparently removing internal organs.” (Billo, Mark, and Greer 2011:53) The figures wear unique head ornamentations, and the authors recognize that this suggests identifiable individuals. “The seventh person, again with a distinctive hairdo and holding hooked sticks, is at the right side of the scene, standing apart as in a kind of observer or instructor.” (Billo, Mark, and Greer 2011:54) Toward the upper right of the grouping there are objects shown lying on the ground which appear to be an atlatl with a pair of darts and lower down another possible pair of atlatl darts along with a more problematic decorated stick or pole. Another probable atlatl is seen at bottom center with a possible dart, and at the top, left of center, two more lines may represent darts.
The second panel is at a site called White Oaks Spring Pictograph site. “White Oaks Spring Pictograph site (LA157206), has more recently been discovered further west in the mountains. Rather than a relatively obscure site situated at the top of a high dry canyon (like Hunters Shelter), this small shallow rockshelter (Figure 9) is in a relatively protected recess in the canyon bottom, near a stream channel with permanent water nearby. Paintings are located about 1.6 meters above the bedrock floor in an area 60 cm wide and 30 cm tall.” (Billo, Mark, and Greer 2011:57)
“In the center is the deer capture or processing scene with hunters holding the four legs of an antlerless deer and an overseer with a long staff (perhaps a typical digging stick for agave extraction) and the same kind of double-recurved club as in the rabbit scene. – Two humans associated with the captured deer are clearly males, with the penis shown, suggesting that portrayal of gender was important, and the individuals perhaps were not wearing pants or loincloths.” (Billo, Mark, and Greer 2011:58)
“Scenes that depict active capture, butchering, dressing, or processing of game animals are rare, and we know of no other examples in rock art or on pottery of butchering actually in progress. The examples at these two shelters, which almost certainly have the same referent and tell the same story, are essentially unique in this extended region.” (Billo, Mark, and Greer 2011:59)
Interestingly, in both locations, the butchering panels are associated with pictographs portraying rabbit hunts shown as rabbit drives involving groups of hunters. Possibly the rabbit drives turned lucky and rounded up a deer as well.
“Panels at Hunters Shelter and White Oaks Spring are so similar that they and some other nearby sites – appear likely to have been painted by the same artist. Such images at several sites in the Guadalupe Mountains are strongly similar in content and manner of expression to much of the Lower Pecos Red Linear Style. Turpin (1984:195, 1994:76) suggests that the Red Linear painters were intrusive into the Lower Pecos region and likely represent a different population from the earlier Pecos River Style.” (Billo, Mark, and Greer 2011:68)
The fine details of these miniature red painted panels seem to fit into the Lower Pecos Red Linear Style giving this particular style quite an expansive distribution. “If additional sites can be identified, especially along the Pecos corridor, and perhaps dated (without destroying the art), it could add significantly to our knowledge of the movement of an early hunter-gatherer population who left this intriguing, generally carefully executed imagery on rock walls over such a great distance. We have proposed the term Pecos Miniature Art to encompass in a descriptive sense this kind of small, fine-line rock art along the greater Pecos River corridor from southeastern New Mexico to the Lower Pecos region of Texas.” (Billo, Mark, and Greer 2011:68)
I would suggest that the fact that in neither scene does the deer have antlers would suggest that either, 1. the deer are females, or, 2. if they are males the scenes take place in Spring shortly after they have shed their antlers.
Additionally, I realize that I began with this with arguments based on bighorn sheep, and these scenes are of deer being butchered. To me, however, these scenes of animal butchery as food procurement, added to the fact I cited above of bighorn sheep blood on the Alibates flint knife and a great deal of rock art of bighorn sheep with arrows in them strengthens the argument that animal images in rock art portray food resources, not metaphors for travel as claimed by Martineau (1973:123)
NOTE 1: I would like to take this opportunity
to congratulate Evelyn Billo, Robert Mark, and John Greer, for their excellent
work, and to thank Robert Mark for permitting me to use their material in this
paper. - Any errors in this presentation are solely my responsibility.
This, and many other fascinating papers are available at the Rupestrian Cyberservices website - http://www.rupestrian.com/index.html - then click on their Publications tab.
NOTE 2: As I was finishing the writing on this, Evelyn Billo generously sent another pertinent photo seen just above, which appears to portray ten anthropomorphs grouped around a bisected bighorn sheep – definitely groceries, not a metaphor!
PRIMARY REFERENCES:
Billo, Evelyn, Robert Mark, and John Greer, 2011, Hunters Shelter and White Oaks Spring Pictographs: Pecos Miniature Art in the Guadalupe Mountains of Southern New Mexico, American Indian Rock Art, Volume 37, Mavis Greer, John Greer, and Peggy Whitehead, editors, American Indian Rock Art Research Association, pp. 49-74.
Faris, Peter, 2011, Bighorn Sheep Petroglyphs – Groceries or Metaphor?, 22 May 2011, https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7760124847746733855/4578003363830180535
Martineau, LaVan, 1973, The Rocks Begin To Speak, KC Publications, Las Vegas, Nevada.
SECONDARY REFERENCES:
Mark, Robert, and Evelyn Billo, 2009, Pictographs at Hunters Shelter: Possible Extensions of the Red Linear Style into the Guadalupe Mountains of Southern New Mexico, Plains Anthropologist 54 (211), 201-210.
Turpin, Solveig A.,1994, Lower Pecos Prehistory: The View from the Caves, In The Caves and Karst of Texas, edited by W.R. Elliot and G. Veni, pp 69-84, National Speleological Sociaty, Huntsville.
Turpin, Solveig A.,1984, The Red Linear Style Pictographs of the
Lower Pecos River Region, Texas, Plains Anthropologist 29 (105):181-198.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment