The Great Basin’s Great Rock Art.“The Great Basin,” the explorer John C. Fremont s

The Great Basin’s Great Rock Art.“The Great Basin,” the explorer John C. Fremont said, is that “intermediate region between the Rocky Mountains and the next range [the Sierra Nevada], containing many lakes with their own system of rivers and creeks…and which have no connection with ocean, or the great rivers which flow into it.” Perhaps the most striking feature of the Great Basin are its many north-south-trending mountain ranges and intervening broad valleys. Many of these ranges are massive. Thirty-three have elevations exceeding 10,000ft and even valleys between these ranges stand at high altitudes. It has been explored in great detail and we have learnt a remarkable amount about how the region came to be the way it is today. Most directly relevant to the basin’s human history are it’s last 12,000 years of its early inhabitants and how they lived in its distant past.Rock art is a familiar but enigmatic trace of ancient people in much of the Great Basin, one that fascinates those who see it and sparks much debate amongst scholars. Native people in the Great Basin made rock art and incorporated it into their social practices perhaps as long as 10,000 years. Their art included visually arresting figures and motifs such as naturalistic depictions of bighorn sheep apparently being hunted.Such images appeal to modern eyes because they seem to show actual scenes of daily life. Other figures and motifs are more mysterious to viewers today. However we interpret it, rock art remains in the place where its makers intended for people to see and interact with. For this reason, few viewers can escape a sense of place and the sweep of human history when looking at rock art in its natural setting.What do the enigmatic rock art panels, motifs, and figures mean, and why did people make them? One answer is that ancient people were trying to enlist magical aid to ensure success in the hunt, increase the numbers of game animals and other resources, or symbolically manage prized or feared animals. In the 1960’s Robert Heizer and Martin Baumhoff adopted this theory known as the hunting-magic theory for Great Basin rock art. In this view, representations of bighorn sheep and deer portray the game of animals that hunters most desired. By making pictures of the animals, hunters could exert some kind of magical control over them.They also noted that many Great Basin rock art sites lie along game trails, in good places for ambushes, and near hunting-related features such as hunting blinds and projectile points. One problem with the hunting-magic explanation is that it cannot account for many rock art sites that have no animals or hunting scenes and other scholars have offered alternative explanations. David Lewis Williams and Jean Clottes’s related the art to stages of hallucinatory experience and shamanic practice based interpretation suggesting that the art was done in ripened states of being and was a direct magical connection to the other world perceived in these states.In the western Great basin, abstract Basin and Range Tradition motifs dominate most sites, and in the eastern part anthropomorphs are most prominent. Also, many rock art sites are near the remains of domestic camps –house rings and tools used for processing plants and seeds –which implies that women as well as men made and used rock art.~JMPhoto Image: My own that I took in the Valley of Fire, Nevada.Further Reading:Prehistoric Rock Art of Nevada and Eastern California.Robert F. Heizer and Martin A. Baumhoff. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1976. 412 pp.The Nevada Rock Art Foundation:http://www.nvrockart.org/Southern Nevada Rock Art Association:http://www.snraa.org/snraa.org/Home.htmlLive Science: http://www.livescience.com/38865-oldest-petroglyphs-rock-art.htmlValley of Fire: http://parks.nv.gov/parks/valley-of-fire-state-park/ -- source link

More pics about