DINOSAUR TRACKS ON THE LINTEL BUILT INTO AN ANCESTRAL PUEBLO DWELLING:

I have written elsewhere about the fact that when I was an undergraduate the field of Art History also included studying architecture and design/decoration. I do not see so much of that these days but, as for me, both architecture and design/decoration are legitimate branches of Art History and thus are eligible for inclusion here in RockArtBlog. The following combines both in an example of an Ancestral Puebloan structure in Utah. 

Lintel over doorway, Ancestral Pueblo.

Photograph: Joshua Smith.

Humans are fascinated by fossils. This was as true for our early ancestors as it is for us. On October 6th, 2016, I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Joshua Smith, a contract paleontologist in Grand Junction, Colorado. We met at his favorite coffee shop and I had an excellent breakfast burrito and a cup of good coffee while we talked about Native American fossil knowledge.  Smith showed me photographs of one of his discoveries, an instance of incorporation of fossil dinosaur footprints into the architecture of an ancestral puebloan building in Utah.

View of the underside of the lintel,

Ancestral Pueblo. Photograph:

Joshua Smith.

Smith first noticed them in 2003. While the building had long been known to archaeologists, apparently no one had noticed the tracks on the underside of the lintel over the doorway until Smith came along (an good example of we see what we expect to see, and an excellent reason for cross-disciplinary studies in rock art).

Pointing out one track on

the lintel, Ancestral Pueblo.

Photograph: Joshua Smith.

Some of the structure is dated from Basketmaker II, AD 50 - 500 (Wikipedia), but most of the construction appears to date from the Pueblo III period, AD 1150 - 1350 (Wikipedia). While the structure is constructed of cream-colored sandstone from nearby, the pinkish-colored sandstone of the lintel stood out as coming from a different source, although also local. In examining it Smith found the two dinosaur tracks on the underside where they were exposed to view. This may be important as the stone could have just as well been placed with the tracks on the upper side hidden from view. This suggests that they were purposely left so they could be viewed, and that they had some significance to the builders and occupants of the structure (Smith 2016).

Pointing out one track on

the lintel, Ancestral Pueblo.

Photograph: Joshua Smith.

Dinosaur tracks are classified into separate ichnospecies from dinosaur remains because they often cannot be pinned down to the exact species that made them. These tracks fall into the category known as Grallator. "Grallator tracks are characteristically three-toed (tridactyl) and range from 5 to 15 centimeters (or 2 to 6 inches) long. While it is usually impossible to match these prints with the exact dinosaur species that left them, it is sometimes possible to narrow down potential trackmakers by comparing the proportions in individual Grallator ichnospecies with known dinosaurs of the same formation." (Wikipedia)

Outlined track on the lintel, Ancestral

Pueblo. Photograph: Joshua Smith.

Smith identified the tracks as belonging to a small theropod dinosaur, similar to a coelophysis, based upon his knowledge of the age of the rock formation and the species extant in that time. (Smith 2016)  Previously, I have written about Native American knowledge of fossil tracksites and cited a Navajo example identifying them as "giant lizard footprints". (Faris 2011) Whether the tracks had a spiritual value to the builder, or were just included for decorative purposes, this important discovery not only adds another example of Native American fossil knowledge, it provides evidence of another facet of their beliefs and material culture in which this knowledge could be expressed. Thank you Josh. 

REFERENCES:

Faris, Peter

2011 Dinosaur Footprints and the Giant Lizard Petroglyphs at Cub Creek, Dinosaur National Monument, Feb. 9, 2011, 

http://rockartblog.blogspot.com.

Smith, Joshua, personal communication, 2016.

Wikipedia

NEANDERTAL ARCHITECTURE:

 la-1464215980-snap-photo

I do not know if reading this title surprises you as much as writing it surprises me, but this seems to be the only conclusion we can make about findings from Bruniquel cave in France. An article by Ewen Callaway from Nature Magazine, on May 25, 2016, and reprinted by Scientific American online, describes arrangements of broken off pieces of stalagmites that I can only understand in terms of intentional structures.

"The six structures are made of about 400 large, broken-off stalagmites, arranged in semi-circles up to 6.7 metres wide. The researchers think that the pieces were once stacked up to form rudimentary walls. All have signs of burning, suggesting that fires were made within the walls. By analysing calcite accreted on the stalagmites and stumps since they were broken off, the team determined that the structures were made 174,400 to 178,600 years ago." (http://www.scientificamerican.com/)

cnrs_20160048_0006

There are two of the stone circles, and four piles of pieces of stalagmite accompanying them. All of this is found 1,000 feet from the entrance of the cave with at least one stretch that requires crawling to pass through.

"Now Jaubert et al. have published he results of their analysis of a remarkable set of structures discovered some 336 meters deep inside Bruniquel Cave in France. Made from the broken-off spears of roughly 400 stalagmites, these circular patterns and seemingly careful piles span between 2 and 7 meters in diameter, and strongly suggest the deliberate actions of someone, or something.

The astonishing aspect is the age that Jaubert et al. find for the formation. The broken pieces of the stalagmites have continued to grow layers since they were snapped off in the wet cave environment, and so the researchers were able to identify where the original calcite surfaces were in their core samples. They then used uranium-series radioisotope dating to come up with a time for the event of around 176,500 years ago (give or take about 2,100 years)." (Scharf, Caleb, 2016, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/176-000-year-old-neandertal-structures-and-life-in-the-universe/)

cnrs_20160048_0005_custom-1d179113df33bb0db56362ecd2047f76a0c8076b-s800-c85

To me this description can only be describing intentional construction from ca. 176,000 years ago, and at that period in time Neandertals were the only hominin in western Europe. 

“The big question is why they made it,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, a palaeoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany who was not involved in the study, which is published online in Nature on May 25. “Some people will come up with interpretations of ritual or religion or symbolism. Why not? But how to prove it?”" (http://www.scientificamerican.com/)

Now, back when I was an art history student, architecture was classified as an art form and included in the textbooks, so I am presenting this as rock art, of a sort. It also provides context for an appraisal of Neandertal creative cognitive ability, and we now know that they could, and did, create rock art. 
Get the full story from the Scientific American article cited below, or read the original in Nature Magazine.

REFERENCE:

Callaway, Ewen, 2016 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/
neandertals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why/

Scharf, Caleb, 2016
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/176-000-year-old-neandertal-structures-and-life-in-the-universe/

ARCHITECTURE IN ROCK ART: A PALEOLITHIC CAMPSITE DEPICTED ON STONE.

Engraving of a brush hut.

Marcos Garcia-Diez, and

Manuel Vaquero, 2015,

PLOS One.

There have been many attempts to define shapes and symbols found in paleolithic paintings or engravings on the walls of caves in Europe as habitation sites or structures. For the most part those have not been generally accepted by scholars.

Now we have the recent announcement and presentation of the discovery of "an engraved schist slab recently found in the Molí del Salt site (North-eastern Iberia) and dated at the end of the Upper Paleolithic, ca. 13,800 years ago. This slab displays seven semicircular motifs that may be interpreted as the representation of dome-shaped huts. The analysis of individual motifs and the composition, as well as the ethnographic and archeological contextualization, suggests that this engraving is a naturalistic depiction of a hunter-gatherer campsite. Campsites can be considered the first human landscape, the first area of land whose visible features were entirely constructed by humans. Given the social meaning of campsites in hunter-gatherer life-styles, this engraving may be considered one of the first representations of the domestic and social space of a human group." (Garcia-Diez and Vaquero 2015)

Drawing of the schist slab with

engravings. Marcos Garcia-Diez,

and Manuel Vaquero, 2015, PLOS One.

"The iconography of Paleolithic art is largely made up of figurative depictions of animals and, less commonly, human figures. There is also a wide repertoire of non-figurative signs. It is generally assumed that this imagery shows the importance of the animal world in the economic, social, and ideological systems of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Moreover, these animal figures exhibit the capacity to represent reality in a naturalistic style. The signs are commonly interpreted as symbolic representations with a heavy ideological burden. However, other interpretations offer a vision of Paleolithic art as social images linked to the realm of the everyday world, challenging its association with a socially restricted religious sphere." (Garcia-Diez and Vaquero 2015)

I suspect that these interpretations of non-figurative, "abstract" images probably teach us more about the scholar making the interpretation then they do about Paleolithic art. "It seems that Paleolithic humans were less interested in representing features of the landscape. In particular, natural landscape features would be rarely represented and uncertain, let alone those forming part of the human landscape (huts and campsites). The few representations interpreted as huts are formally undefined and open to alternative interpretations." (Garcia-Diez and Vaquero 2015)

The schist slab with locations of the

engravings circled. Marcos Garcia-Diez,

and Manuel Vaquero, 2015, PLOS One.

The schist slab from the Molí del Salt bears seven domed or rounded, flat-bottomed shapes engraved into the surface that truly look like the portrayal of a village of huts made by a group of hunter-gatherers.

"There are seven graphic units in the upper surface, while only a small set of lines are recognized in the lower one. The graphic units correspond to seven semicircular motifs whose interior was filled by straight parallel lines. The geometric structures are constructed from two different contour lines–one straight and one curved–that define the convex character. The straight line defines the lower part of the motif, so all structures have the same disposition. The interconnection between the two structural lines is blurred, as neither contour line touches or exceeds the other (normally, the bottom line exceeds the ends of the curved line). The number of internal lines varies between 7 and 11, mostly covering the entire interior space. The internal lines, in general, do not reach the contour lines, and they show a horizontal (two cases) or oblique (five cases, three of which show a marked tendency to vertical) disposition. The size of the graphic units varies between 43 and 20 mm in width and between 22 and 14 mm in height. If we consider only the semicircular shape, without considering the appendices of the lower contour line, the dimensions range between 30 and 18 mm in width and 22 and 14 mm in height." (Garcia-Diez and Vaquero 2015)

"We hypothesize that the seven semicircular motifs in the MS engraving represent dwellings or huts. In addition, the close formal, metric, and technical linkages among these motifs, as well as their distribution in the graphic field, indicate their compositional association and their execution in a short time. To support the interpretation of the MS engraving as a campsite, we will focus on three aspects for which we have ethnographic information: the outline of the huts, their proportions, and the number of huts in a campsite. The use of ethnographic information in archeological interpretation has been common since the 1970s. This is based on the assumption that there are some analogies between present and past societies that produce similar archeological outcomes. Hunter-gatherer architecture is strongly conditioned by one of the characteristics associated to most hunter-gatherer societies: residential mobility. According to this assumption, mobile hunter-gatherers will show common traits in their architectural patterns, regardless their historical contexts." (Garcia-Diez and Vaquero 2015)

Added to this argument is the undeniable fact that the natural materials used for construction of such huts really only go together effectively in a limited number of ways, and the modern (and presumably paleolithic) brain is inherently in favor of efficiency  and effectiveness in preparing such structures. These huts should be expected to resemble the brush huts found in hunter-gatherer societies found in other times and places, and so they do.

REFERENCE:

Garcia-Diez, Marcos and Manuel Vaquero,

2015    Looking at the Camp: Paleolithic Depiction of a Hunter-Gatherer Campsite, PLOS One, Published Dec. 2, 2015, DOI: 10.1371/Journal pone.0143002.