Our founder Stephen Alvarez was interviewed on public radio about producing the Storied Rock article in National Geographic Magazine and the work of the Ancient Art Archive. Listen to the interview here. Storied Rock is live on National Geographic’s website (here subscription required). You can see the images on Alvarez’s website by going to America’s Murals. The post Storied Rock Interview appeared first on Ancient Art Archive ..read more

The Rochester Creek Rock Art Site is an extraordinary Fremont site in Emery County, Utah. While most of the images are Fremont, the site has artwork from the Archaic through modern periods. With a story telling team of Native American descendants, land managers and archaeologists we have put together this 3 minute film that imagines the site from the point of view of Ute spiritual leader Larry Cesspooch. The film is based on our 3D modeling of the site and put together by the amazing James Cawley of Centerstar Creative. The video is part of our Mural of America Project that looks at North Ame ..read more

Its long been assumed that pictograph sites like Cueva de las Manos (pictured) in Argentinian Patagonia were more than 7,000 years old. A paper this week in Science Advances by lead author Guadalupe Romero Villanueva announces new, much older dates for rock art in Patagonia. The pictographs in a handful of rock shelters described in the paper are more than 8,000 years old. The research team derived carbon 14 dates from carbon in the paint itself -the gold standard in pictograph dating. Patagonia one of the final places in the Americas to be explored by humans, and the new dates are not terribl ..read more

The distinct artistic form known as the Barrier Canyon Style (BCS) stands as a remarkable representation of ancient rock art primarily found in Utah, notably concentrated within the San Rafael Swell and Canyonlands National Park. This unique style extends across a significant expanse of Utah and western Colorado, creating a profound mark on the landscape. Coined by Polly Schaafsma in “The Rock Art of Utah” (1971, revised 2002), this classification encompasses various sites, notably along Barrier Creek in the former Barrier Canyon, now known as Horseshoe Canyon. above, a detail of the Great Ga ..read more

Today the Department of Justice announced that a Nevada man has been sentenced to 6 months in prison for damaging rock art in Gold Butte National Monument, Nevada. According to a Department of Justice press release, Michael Shorter (44) pled guilty to a felony violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act for intentionally damaging and removing a petroglyph in the Mud Wash area of the National Monument. You can read details here. Gold Butte was established as a National Monument in 2016 in part because of its amazing collection of rock art. The 300,000 acre Monument contains petrogl ..read more

An article published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal posits that lines, dots and “Y” symbols written on paleolithic cave art images represent a time keeping system. In the article the authors argue that statistical analysis of over 700 paleolithic images shows a relationship between dots, lines and “Y” shaped images on or near images of animals and times of the animals breeding or migration. A portion of the Horse Panel in Chauvet Cave shows red marks on both a horse and lion. The image above is one of the examples the authors use to illustrate their point. In it you can see red marks ..read more

Founding board member emeritus Dr Jan Simek has a new book about cave art in the Southeastern United States. Dr David Whitley gives us a detailed review. A Dark Pathway: Precontact Native American Mud Glyphs from 1st Unnamed Cave, Tennessee, by Jan F. Simek. 2022. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. xviii+195 pp., 85 b&w and 19 color figures, 14 tables, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781621907176, hardcover. By David S. Whitley Rock Art Research Institute University of the Witwatersrand “Mud glyph” and “1st Unnamed Cave” are not particularly inspiring terms that, at first glance, might p ..read more

Looking for a weekend rock art get away? We’ve made some updates to our public rock art sites interactive map. All the sites on the list are actively managed for public visitation. Changes include a new site Rock Hawk, direction maps to Rock Eagle and Serpent Mound, better access to embedded VR models in Chauvet, Mt Irish and The Great Gallery of Horseshoe Canyon. The post Updates to our public rock art sites appeared first on Ancient Art Archive ..read more

We’ve made some changes to our recommended rock art sites list. There are two new sites: Rock Hawk in Eatonton Georgia USA Alta Museum, Norway We have also added maps to help with directions and trip planning to Rock Eagle. There are millions of rock art sites around the world, and most are protected by secrecy. We have curated a list of the sites where public access is encouraged. When traveling to these or any rock art sites please Visit With Respect. The post Updates to recommended sites list appeared first on Ancient Art Archive ..read more

A new paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (here) makes the case that the several of the pictographs in Serranía de la Lindosa, Colombia are depictions of long extinct megafauna. A perplexing issue in the rock art of the Americas is the relative scarcity of depictions of paleolithic megafauna. We know that humans have thrived in this hemisphere for more than 21,000 years. From the archaeological record we also know that the first humans here encountered and hunted megafauna -mammoths, giant sloths, camelids- But where are the depictions of those animals in the rock art of ..read more