SHIELDS AND SHIELD FIGURES IN ROCK ART:

All-American Man, Salt Creek, Canyonlands, UT.

Photograph: 1983, Don I. Campbell.

One fascinating class of imagery in rock art is the well-known shield figures of the American West. Although seen in a number of variations the shield figure is basically a shield (usually the larger sized shield carried by a pedestrian warrior) with portions of the anatomy of the figure carrying it seen protruding from the edges of the shield; legs at the bottom, head at the top, and with weapons or ceremonial items often portrayed as well. Shield figures have always fascinated me because they very often portray the sorts of details of adornment, decoration, or accessories that allow us to assume that the representation is of a specific shield that would be the property of a specific, and recognizable, person – in other words a portrait.

All-American Man, Salt Creek, Canyonlands, UT.

Photograph: 1983, Don I. Campbell.

One of the most famous shield bearing figures is found in Utah, in Canyonlands National Park. The “All-American Man” figure is rounded and bears a brightly decorated shield. He is seen in front view with straight legs and feet angled down slightly to his left. His face and head are seen straight on and we can discern facial features as well as some form of neck band as well as two antenna-like projections from his head, perhaps feathers in a headdress. His name refers to his decoration in red, white, and a bluish paint and references indicate that he has a radiocarbon date of A.D. 1295. 

Close-up of shield figures, Werstwater canyon, UT.

Photograph:  Oct. 8, 2001, Peter Faris.

With his rounded contours All-American Man resembles the shield bearing warriors from Westwater Creek, Utah, much more than the shield bearing warriors from McConkey Ranch, near Vernal, Utah.

Shields, Castle Gardens, Fremont County, WY.

Photograph: Peter Faris, Sept. 1992.

Dr. Lawrence Loendorf has written some insightful comments about shield figures: “The oldest shields or shield warriors found in the Montana and Wyoming region are in the Castle Garden Shield Style. - - Castle Garden Shield Style figures are made in a unique way. Before making these pictographs, the artist prepared the rock surface by abrading it to remove undulations or protuberances and produce a flat, smooth palette. This surface preparation removed the less-consolidated outer layer of surface sandstone to reveal a harder, inner layer for painting."

 Shields, Castle Gardens, Fremont County, WY.

 Photograph: Peter Faris, Sept. 1992.

           "Once smoothed, the artist incised a pattern of the shield or shield warrior on the rock palette. - - Paint colors include two shades of red (one more purple than the other), two shades of orange (one more yellow than the other), black, white, and green. Polychrome paintings are rare in Wyoming and Montana and this is one of the criteria by which the Castle Garden Style shields and shield warriors can be identified. Use of green paint is also an important criterion because it is rare in the region.

            In an excavation in the Valley of the Shields, I recovered two sandstone-abrading tools used to smooth the surface in preparation for the paintings (Loendorf 1990). One of these had paint adhering to it as though the artist picked it up to do some additional smoothing while in the process of applying paint. The tools were found in direct association with the remains of a hearth, and it was possible to obtain standard radiocarbon dates on the charcoal. Two dates with overlapping sigma were obtained using the correction tables it is clear the Castle Garden Shield Style pictographs were made at the Valley of the Shields ca. A.D. 1100.” (Loendorf 1990:49) Great information Larry, as always.

Shields and shield figures are so fascinating to me because they offer entry points into a whole range of questions in rock art: portraiture, the pedestrian-to-equestrian warrior transition (and thus the societal changes cause by the adoption of the horse), heraldry, and even inter- and intra-tribal interaction and communication.

REFERENCE:

Loendorf, Lawrence

2004   Shields and Shield Warrior Pictographs and Petroglyphs in the Intermountain West, pages 103-117, in New Dimensions in Rock Art Studies, edited by Ray T. Matheny, Museum of Peoples and Cultures Occasional Papers No. 9, Brigham Young University, Provo.

PROFESSIONAL BIAS IN ROCK ART STUDIES:

Warrior petroglyph, Plains Apachean, Picture Canyon,

Comanche Grasslands, Baca County, Colorado.

Photo: Peter Faris, 1986.

As the archaeologist for Comanche Grasslands in southeastern Colorado stated at a rock art meeting back in the 1990s, “you have to understand – I am the professional”. She made this statement to a group of rock art researchers from varying backgrounds who had been studying the rock art of southeastern Colorado for many years. She made this comment when some of us challenged her statements that doing rubbings from rock art panels would not harm the images. When it came to rock art she could not have found her elbow with a hammerstone, but she was so blinded by conceit and professional bias that to her an art historian and an engineer who had been studying rock art for decades could not possibly know as much about it as an archaeologist who had not studied rock art at all.

A totally opposite sensibility was displayed by Linea Sundstrom who wrote in Talking With The Past: the Ethnography of Rock Art (Keyser, et al.  2006: 136-7) “I think a lot of us are trained to think that the only way to study anything is through “science”. Most of us have our degrees in anthropology and yet very few of us were required to take a course in history, art history, or historical theory. I suggest that this is our bias. We think we’re scientific and therefore unbiased, but instead we’re scientific and biased in that particular way. There are other ways to study the world.”

Lawrence Loendorf expressed a similar recognition of the situation when he wrote in Discovering North American Rock Art (2005: 7) “When it comes to studying rock art traditional archaeologists, especially those trained in the United States, are a curious lot. Although they might take a photograph or two at a newly discovered site, they prefer to ignore the site’s research potential. The nature of a rock art site itself may be part or the reason. Archaeologists take pride in their ability to make meticulous and complete records of everything they uncover during an excavation. When remains such as hearths are encountered, they are carefully removed and taken back to the laboratory for additional analysis. In contrast, rock art sites are fixed in the landscape rather than portable and must be recorded in situ.”

Another example of this sort of approach can be found in the voluminous work of James Keyser who, although trained as an archaeologist, has primarily focused on rock art and has made monumental contributions to what we know about it.

What Linea Sundstrom, Lawrence Loendorf and Jim Keyser have in common that has led them to this sensitivity is that although they are professional archaeologists, they have specialized in rock art studies during significant careers. I believe that such a concentrated focus has opened their eyes to the limitations of a traditional archaeology degree toward so many questions in rock art.

I submit that there are indeed a number of other disciplines that can provide insights into rock art and the creative processes that manufacture it. An art training is invaluable in understanding the materials and techniques of artistic production, and might also provide some insight toward the motivation behind artistic production. An education in comparative religion should also be valuable in understanding the motivation behind the creation of some rock art, and also its place in the culture and its rites. Finally, historians are not only encouraged, but expected, to extrapolate from a limited number of facts to a large conclusion which is applied to the history of a culture, and Art Historians perform the same role in analysis of the art of that culture, and in the case of rock art interpretation we are often/usually exrapolating from a limited number of facts.

In order to reach a proper understanding and appreciation of rock art, I submit that we can use the input and understanding of researchers from many disciplines. Not that any one of us will always have the correct answer, but we will at least have been open to potential insights that traditional archaeology, and any other single discipline, may have overlooked. We are all in this together.

REFERENCES:

Keyser, James D. George Poetschat, and Michael W. Taylor, editors,

2006    Talking With The Past: The Ethnography of Rock Art, Oregon Archaeological Society, Portland.

Loendorf Lawrence L., Christopher Chippindale, and David S. Whitely, editors,

2005    Discovering North American Rock Art, University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

AN EXCITING ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUE - X-RAY FLUORESCENSE SPECTROSCOPY:

Back in the early 1980s, I first heard of a very exciting analytical technique being applied to art history studies – neutron activation analysis. This was described in an article by Maurice J. Cotter, Neutron Activation Analysis of Paintings published in the January-February 1981 issue of American Scientist magazine (pages 17-27). It is based upon the same general phenomenon as C14 dating, that each element has its own discrete atomic half life. If you can use some form of radiation source to irradiate a sample and induce radiation in it, the rate with which that radiation dissipates (its half life) can be measured and analyzed to identify the discrete elements in the sample and their respective proportions. Of course, that reading would be of the remaining elements of the paint as well as the elements in the surface that the paint is on. By taking readings of an adjacent area of unpainted stone surface, a comparison would then illuminate the contents of the paint. Simply put, any difference in the readings between the two areas can be assumed to represent the contents of the paint. At the time I recognized that having portable equipment to do this would allow us to begin to identify the pigments used in the paint of pictographs, but alas, I am not a nuclear scientist.

Multiple colors, Notches Dome, WY,

Photo-Bonnie Newman, 2005

A technique similar to this has now been applied pigment analysis of rock art in just that manner in a fascinating project conducted by Bonita Newman and Dr. Lawrence Loendorf. They used portable x-ray equipment in July 2005 to analyze the elements in the pigments of pictographs at rock art sites. Newman described the process as follows:

Dr. Loendorf  taking a reading, Photo - Bonnie Newman, 2005

“Pigment analysis at the three selected sites was conducted with a portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometer. This small, light hand held unit provides non-destructive elemental analysis.

As the atoms of an element are struck by high energy photons from the x-ray source, electrons from the inner shells are knocked from their orbits around the nuclei of the atoms, causing those atoms to become unstable ions. To re-establish stability, electrons from the next higher shell move to the vacant inner orbits emitting energy as they move.

This phenomenon is referred to as fluorescence. Since each element maintains a different electron shell configuration, the spectrum produced by each episode of fluorescence is unique, allowing the element to be identified.”

Now think about how important this actually is. After a century of guessing and making assumptions about the chemical contents of the paint used in producing pictographs we can now know exactly what those elements are! Think of what a database this will eventually be.

In a future posting I will discuss some of the results of their studies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Bonita Newman is an archaeologist with ICI Corporation, Virginia Beach, VA., and is currently a member of the board of directors of the Colorado Rock Art Association. Lawrence Loendorf is a noted rock art researcher, a former president of the American Rock Art Research Association, and is a retired New Mexico State University professor.