American History Hit - Prehistoric North America

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

What could the prehistoric artists of North America have in common with the graffiti artists of today? Picked into the rocks of southwestern Arizona, a couple hour drive from Tucson, are marks of the Patayan and Hohokam traditions. The petroglyphs are an insight into these civilisations, their religions and their lives.Aaron Wright is a Preservation Archaeologist whose research is currently focused on the Hohokam and Patayan traditions. He joined Don to explore what this rock art has in common with sites across North America, and what makes it different.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Feel how they are cut into the hard, hot rocks of the Arizona desert. Nearly a thousand years ago, native peoples, the Ho-Hokom and the Patayan, used handmade chisels and hammerstones to chip away rock surfaces, exposing paler material beneath. Looking closely at these designs, feeling them with your feet, fingertips. Their detailed tooling is evident, echoed in the texture of the patterns. But why? Why did they carve them? What did they signify? And how were these symbols different from other rock imagery elsewhere in the United States and in the world? This is American

History Hit. Thanks for taking the time. I'm Don Wildman. Glad you're listening. All those who enjoy a good long hike in the wilderness, particularly in sunny, arid lands out west with plenty of rocky outcroppings will from time to time likely stumble upon evidence of previous civilizations drawn onto or into rock surfaces. Rendrings, hundreds, if not a thousand years old, that stop you in your tracks to stare in wonder, trying to decipher the mystery and motivation behind the considerable effort it took to create the thing. Perhaps it's an animal shape or a human figure, a celestial body, force of nature, or more of an abstract shape, a swirl or a checkerboard, or a who the heck knows what that's supposed to be. It's art. Rock art, scrawled, painted, pecked out, or carved

right into the stone. Rock art is everywhere in the world, with more of it found all the time, some of it by the likes of my guest today. Aaron Wright is a leading light in the world of anthropological studies out there in the great American Southwest. Welcome, Dr. Wright. Nice to meet you, Don. When my producer, Sophie, told me we'd booked you personally, I was thrilled, because some years ago I'd had an experience in Utah. And how many cocktail conversations have you had that start like this, I imagine? I was walking along the cliffs at McConkey Ranch in Utah, where you can study these insanely elaborate, pretty wild figures etched upon the rock face,

evidence of, I believe, the Fremont people. And I was on camera at the time, trying to sound wiser than I actually was or am. Today I get to learn what I should have known. I'll do my best to share with you my impression in my experiences with this subject. Explain, please, sir, the utter vastness of this subject matter, I've hinted at it. Rock art is all over the world from every age of man, and generally why? What does it represent and what is it conveying about human civilization? Well, it's fundamental to the human experience.

You know, the oldest stuff that we know of may even pre-date, you know, what we consider our own species today. So it's fundamentally human. It's part of our evolutionary trajectory. And that's why it's found across the world on all six continents where humans have lived. And so it's part of our collective story. And so there's a unifying thread that it's imagery on stationary surfaces. But there's also it's replete with temporal, cultural, regional distinctions that make it unique and specific to the people that made it.

I know your career focuses on the southwest Arizona, especially, I believe. Who are the civilizations there you investigate and what kind of rock art have they produced over the years? I work in Southern Arizona. The archaeological traditions that I work with, we call Holcombe and Patayan. And those are material cultural traditions that archaeologists define for pretty much encompasses the entire southern Arizona region, extends into Sonora, Patayan extends into California, et cetera. But we're looking at that Sonora and desert area. And the rock imagery traditions that are present in this area correspond closely with the archaeological traditions that archaeologists have to find. So archaeologists generally don't talk about tribes or people.

because we can't necessarily see them. We're really looking at material culture patterns. I think of pottery and architecture and things like that. And those patterns that we identify correspond with the ancestral traditions of contemporary tribal people. And so with Hō Khong, we're really talking about the ancestors

of the contemporary Aatim people. The word Hulakam is actually anglicization of the Aatim word for ancestors, which is Hulaghan. And the same with Pata Yan. Most archaeologists concede that Pothayan is the ancestral traditions of the contemporary human speakers. And that would include tribes such as the Quetzan, the Maricopa, or the Pipash, the Mojave, the Kumay in San Diego, et cetera.

And, of course, Patajan is a human work for ancestry. Do they still produce this art currently? Depends on who you ask. I'm only in the impression that yes. And this gets at one of the, I think, one of the fundamental mysteries, if you will, about rock imagery is that as far as we can tell, It was never really made by a lot of people. So the secrecy around it today is probably a relict of the way it's always been.

If we correlate the number of images that we know of or have existed and sort of use a ratio type of scale to the number of people that have lived in these areas over the millennia, you really get into some really amazing numbers and the numbers are quite low. My first study in the Phoenix area, I looked at a landscape in the South Mountains on the southern edge of Phoenix. And we estimate there are about 7,500, 8,000 petroglyphs there. It's one of the largest concentrations of Ho-O-Com rock imagery that we know of. But when you scale it to the amount of people that lived in these Hohom villages around the mountains over the thousand years that they were there, and then you can look at high and low estimates of population levels that archaeologists presented. And you can look at the full thousand years of Ho-O-O-O-COM, the cultural tradition that we identify as Ho-O-COM,

are more restricted. And it comes out to about one to seven glyphs per year. So it was never a common practice, and it wasn't like everyone was making these all the time in their spare time. It was a very specialized endeavor. Probably only certain people of the community were doing it, and they were probably doing it at particular times, very intentional. And so today, there are signs that rock imagery continues to be made amongst the descendant communities.

It's rare. And, of course, no one is really outing themselves as the manufacturers of this imagery. Let us, for the purposes of organizing this conversation, break down the different kinds of rock art we're talking about. You've already mentioned petroglyphs. That's as opposed to what other categories? Generally, the two main categories are petroglyphs and pictographs. The difference being petroglyphs are impressed into the rock surface, either through chiseling and sizing,

abrading, petting, but essentially it's a reductive technology and your removal portion of the rock base. Pictagrass is an additional technology, so you're adding some sort of pigment or colorant to the rock surface to create an image. And then you get combinations of those. Sometimes you get petroglyphs that have been painted over, etc. And then a third form that I personally don't love with the others, but other people do are these ground figures or geoglyphs that are really spectacular part of the cultural landscapes of Southern Arizona and southeastern California, generally associated with the Ponteaian tradition. But they're basically figurative forms laid out on the ground surface. And similarly, they're either impressed into the ground, and those are generally called antagonios, or they're constructed on top of the ground by adding rocks. Those are often called geoglids, but collectively they're ground figures.

Do the NASCAR lines fit into that category? Very much so. And as it is with the rock imagery writ large, geoglyphs are found, I believe, on all six continents where humans have existed. It's just they're more prevalent in certain areas than not, and they're generally on landscapes conducive to creating these types of images. So in southwest Arizona, it's these volcanic landforms covered with desert pavements. Yeah, it's those kind of burned looking rocks, right? I mean, that are just cooked by the sun for hundreds and hundreds of years, if not millions, I suppose. And then they are the perfect canvas upon which to work for that side of sort of artist, I suppose.

Are these mostly shamanistic individuals? Are they ritualistic practices or just seasonal? Or are they just fun? You know, where does it fall? Well, I don't think it's just for fun. Yeah. That's what all of my research and all my consultation with the Senate communities has led me to conclude. and I still don't have a complete answer, and I probably never will.

The shamanistic interpretation is a very popular one. I haven't bought into that myself, personally in my own research, and we just don't have a strong case for that in the Southwest. Those types of interpretations, hypotheses, perhaps work better amongst hunter-gatherer communities, which Great Basin makes sense. South Africa, where those models were popularized and developed, makes sense. In the southwest, we don't really have clear signs of shamans, so to speak.

We have traditional religious practitioners, people that are leaders of priesthoods, etc., but the typical concept of a shaman isn't well expressed amongst contemporary and descendant communities, nor is it really apparent in the archaeological record. And so the research that I've done, I've concluded that it's, of course, it's ritualistic. It's just not for fun. There's a lot of structure to it. In the work that I have done looking at basically the anthropology of ritual and religion, the rock imagery, at least in the southwest, bears almost every hallmark of what a ritual practice is,

a religious ritual practice. We look at redundancy, repetition, form, audience, sort of all these criteria. And what really distinguishes ritual from things like ceremony or theater, is the allusion or the association to the numinous or the spiritual. And with the rock imagery, that really talking with the descendant communities and really hearing their perspectives. And that perspective would be that at certain times of the year, I would imagine, there would have been rituals. Typically, this was seasonal concerns for needs of water, needs or food, prey, etc. Would that have been the prompt for this sort of thing, do you think?

Or was it an ongoing practice? It's all speculative, I understand. It's possible. And the way anthropologists usually try to give this is through ethnographic comparisons. And if that were the case in the southwest, including peripheral regions like Southern California, we can think of certain types of rituals like puberty initiation rituals or the coming of age rituals, especially for California. I believe those are still practice.

And then, of course, seasonal ceremony and ritual with the coming of the coming of movement of the sun and there's been a lot of work on archaeo-astronomy of rock imagery. Of course, that would fit into that sort of paradigm. And it was probably made in a number of different contexts. What's interesting about that is that the iconography that they chose to use really doesn't differ as far as we can tell between the different contexts. And so they're using a sort of a shared system of symbols or signs. amongst these different geolocational contexts, which probably correlate with different actual types of ritual practices.

We find rock imagery often alongside trails, and they're probably part of a larger system of trail ritualism. It includes rock shrines and offering piles and things like that that that we find in the deserts. And so the production of rock imagery really was used in these different types of ritual contexts. Of course, it was contingent upon the person making it. It's one of those common denominators of humanity, really, this desire or need to express pictorally ourselves upon a canvas of whatever that canvas might be. I mean, it really does run the gamut through all of civilization, and maybe for many of the same reasons, even though they might not be for the same purpose, this primal need we have

to express ourselves this way. The oldest of these examples, I suppose, we'd find in Australia. I know there's Lascaux, the cave in France that got so much press in our time. Do you find similarities with all art around the world this way or not? No, not necessarily. Of course, there are certain symbols or icons that are transcendent, circles and spirals. That gives some credence to these arguments of the neuropsychology, phosene arguments that are really the foundation of the shamanic hypothesis or the

authoritative case of conscious hypothesis. But again, these are simple shapes. What makes these regionally distinct styles, if you will, people build upon those and make them specific to their cultural traditions or whatnot. But what's really fascinating to me at least about the earliest rock imagery, especially the stuff from the Upper Paleolympic, is that it's so ornate and detailed, you know, those cave animals, etc. And that really contradicts the situation in the Western U.S.,

the Desert West, North America. where the earliest imagery here is really abstract. It's complex, but it's incredibly abstract. Figurative imagery like animals and human forms, et cetera. Don't really enter the lexicon until the late Holocene period. So the last several thousand years, depending on where you are. I've heard some pretty antiquated and I'd say racist arguments that people weren't involved enough at that point to make the limit as well, we can just refute that by looking at Laskin. So there's just the types of imagery that are being made is really contingent upon the people that are making them, their interests, their desires, and who the audience is.

Now, with the earliest rock imagery across the world, it's changing so rapidly with discoveries, if you will, that I'm not sure exactly where the oldest is anymore. I believe there's some that's been attributed to Neanderthal, which is our evolutionary predecessor, but there was overlap, contemporary overlap with early homo sapiens. And so it's not quite clear. But yeah, we're looking at at least 50 to 60,000 years ago, conservatively. As opposed to the Americas where, I mean, arrival comes any time between 10 and 15,000 years, even maybe even older than that. Contentious debate in that regard. Has Rock Art been a part of that discussion as far as the arrival of humans in North America?

Is the record there? It has been in a very controversial way. You know, I'm not espousing any sort of position on the antiquity of humans in North America when the tribes tell me that they've been here since time in Memorial, I believe in, I take them from the word. With regard to the rock imagery, the oldest that we've got securely dated in North America is from the Nevada area, I believe it's Lake Winamukkah.

And it's basically late Pleistocene, so that corresponds with these sort of Paleo-Indian concepts. But back in the 90s, there were efforts to date some of this great base in rock imagery through radiocarbon dating of organic matter trapped in the varnish that grows on tops of petrogloos. And they got some pretty incredible dates, like 40,000 years, BP, et cetera. And this made, of course, international attention with sort of these pre-Clovis arguments, which in the 90s was having a resurgence at the same time. So it had a willing audience, if you will.

But those dating techniques have been refuted, and those dates are no longer accepted by the professional community. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Step back in time with me, Tristan Hughes, on the ancients from history hit as we unearth Pompeii's buried secrets in a special mini-series. You'll discover what life was like in this town before the eruption of Vesuvius, the bustling streets, the roar of the gladiators, and the hidden lives of society.

sex workers. Lost for over 1,500 years and then uncovered, Pompeii's saga continues. With the help of leading experts, we'll bust myths and reveal star-sling new research. So get ready for a dramatic journey through the echoes of the past. Experience Pompeii like never before on the ancients from history hit. Listen and follow wherever you get to your podcasts. When you approach a site, say, in Arizona, how do you date that? What is the technique? the science behind it? Well, generally, in the southwest, because we have a pretty good inventory, most of the rock imagery, you date, for lack of a better word, through its iconicity.

And so it's stylistically part of such and such rock imagery tradition, and therefore it dates in this period. So that's the easiest way, that's the most applied way. So the Gila style, which is associated with whole comp tradition. If it is a Gila style of glyph, and we know the whole comp tradition is from approximately 80,500 to 1450, then we can put the glyph in that sort of date range. Of course, we can get more accurate, I guess, or more specific. This is generally where, you know, people don't take it to this level, but you can do really interesting quantitative techniques with superimpositioning of the imagery,

the color, which is a proxy for the age of the imagery. And this is what I've done in my research, to bring some objectivity, if you will, some statistical procedures. to determining, you know, relative ages of some of the imagery. And then there are other ways are what's depicted in the imagery. So if there's a horse, for example, or if it's clearly a horse, then, okay, it's probably post-1540, which is introduction of Spaniards into the northwest or into the southwest, whether or not it's a bow or an atlattle, which are technological traditions that are dated to certain areas. I mentioned the place in Utah that I was looking at, and I just want to take a moment and describe

how absolutely cool this imagery is. I mean, it's out there. I mean, it's a really imaginative, fantastical view of the human figure. There are details to this having to do with rainfall, and this was me on camera trying to figure out what things were in real time. I had nobody to tell me, so I was as ignorant as I sound right now. But it was just impressive, is what I'm trying to say, as to how crafted they were and really uplifting in their expression.

It was really extraordinary to look at. Absolutely. And that's what really got me into this type of research is just being awestruck with the imagery. Of course, that elicits all sorts of questions. What does it mean? Who made it? Why is it here? Et cetera. Really, that's the alert. That's what draws people in. Some traditions like the Fremont tradition that you're speaking of is known for this very bold, large, extrahuman type of imagery. And on the lower heave where I work with the Sears Point styles, what some archaeologists have called it, but essentially it's a pot. on rock imagery tradition. It's very similar. It's large. It's bold. It's in your face. It's towering over top of you. It's looking down on you. And so it really is a humbling experience.

It really puts, for me at least, it puts me in my place as some person coming along many centuries later thinking that I might know something about this subject. Oh, no, that was exactly my feeling, was the sense of humility. And you're staring at a work of genius. The problem is, while you're looking at it, you're worried about it because it's so vulnerable to the elements. Here's this incredible piece of artwork that's just out there and out there for, I guess, upwards of 500 years in this case. How does this rock art stick around so long? I mean, what preserves it? Well, it's stitched in the stone. And there was a reason for that. Of course, the people that made the rock imagery knew that they could do something similar by simply chalking out an image on a rock face.

And that probably took place all the time. We just don't have any record. of it because it washes away. And so there was very much an intentionality for permanence. And that's one of the clues that we have about the significance of rock imagery, and that it's not just dundling. It was put on there to stay on there. For the most part, there's actually some rock imagery where it looks like it wasn't meant to be seen for very long. That's a whole other discussion. But most of the stuff that we think about in terms of petrogless, at least, permanence was part of the message. And they tend to have been placed on very stable services. For the the most part. We're looking at things that are several thousands of years old. They may, you know,

eroded beyond the, maybe the, what can be recognized or realized by the person that needed. I would think that the vernacular imagery, you know, what we would call graffiti today would be fascinating subject for this. There must be plenty of that, I guess. You mean like the Euro-American initials that we see everywhere? Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's an interesting parallel. And I was thinking about that earlier and that even that imagery has ritualistic elements to it. even though people that may not have thought of it that way, and it doesn't necessarily have allusions to spirituality,

but it has hallmarks of this ritualized behavior. It's very redundant. Names and dates and initials. It occurs in very select places, generally at places that already have existing rock imagery, which we see amongst indigenous traditions as well. They tend to have made it in the same places over time, where prior traditions have put it.

And of course, it's not everyone's doing it. It's a select group of people. and they tend to be doing it in secrecy because it's illegal at rock imagery sites. So interesting parallels to be drawn for sure. There must be a great connection also to geography. And what would the archaeology and geography term be, where you're finding petroglyphs, etc., in places where tribal settlements would have been but aren't anymore,

rivers having moved and so forth? What is that relationship in the disciplines? I believe we generally think about that in terms of cultural landscapes. And that's really where my work lies, looking at the relationship of a rock imagery with the rest of the people who made it in their surrounding environments. And so it's integration of rock imagery with the village sites, the trail sites, et cetera, looking at it holistically in place, across space, but then also incorporating ontological aspects of the cultural landscape. So indigenous understandings of landscape and their place within it, which we get through ethnograph. information and et cetera. So building these cohesive understandings of the landscape and rock imagery plays a

critical role in cultural landscape studies. There was a moment when I dove in Lake Michigan once to look at a rock, very highly debatable whether this was actually the image that's on this rock, claimed to be a mastodon, looks a whole lot like it when you go down in 40 feet of water and look at this thing. What was undeniable was the fact that this big rock was in the middle of a large circle of rocks and a long line of rocks. All of that was very clear in that very clean water. And this was indeed a blind, a hunting site where it would have made sense that they would have carved this on there. Whether it was there or not, it was a fascinating lens into

what that whole lifestyle was. And that's how I think of your work as being the sort of lens into this whole cultural experience that you've only got the rock imagery left over from whatever was there before. Absolutely. There's a lot of filling in the blanks. That's where I get uncomfortable lip, of course. I definitely don't want to be making things up and speaking for people that can't speak for themselves. And that's why I really like to partner with the descendant communities, really bringing their story into the fore. I'm trained in the tieroculture patterning and inventory. And I have ideas, of course. But the more I work with this, the more I realize I don't really know much. I would think that new technology digitization of all of this has just ramped this up in

no small way. Is there a time coming of critical mass when scientists such as your yourself or anthropologists as yourself understand so much more about where it all fits in chronologically that you'll be able to wrap it up very well? I hope so. Is that a goal within your career? I'm curious. I may not see it within my lifetime. It's a really slow progress.

Rock imagery research, it's hard work. We really are handicapped in terms of being able to date it and archaeology for the most part. Bread and butter is dating chronology, temporal work. And so really moving. Beyond that handicap, some people see it as an impediment, but it can also be a liberating experience. Archaeology doesn't have to be fixated on time sequences.

And for the people that made this rock imagery, their ontology of time was radically different than our own. So it may not even be appropriate to think of it along those lives. In terms of the digital revolution and rock imagery, it's quite fascinating. And who knows what will be? Ten years ago, 3D modeling was the cutting edge. And I remember getting a quote from a professional firm to do a 3D. model of one of the sites I was working at. It was something over about $100,000.

And today, I can do it with a $200 drone and some freeway off the internet. So that's really where methodological advancements in rock imagery is taking places in the digital realm. In terms of the actual, what I would say, the practical realm, the sort of the knowledge-based round, the dating, if you will, we're still trying to figure it out. Old school. Yeah, some of these old techniques, the superpositioning and the rock varnish relative dating, techniques. They're not as great as radio carbonating, but they still work, especially when they're applied correctly and critically. Well, nothing beats getting out there kneeling down, studying that thing you've seen a thousand times, but I see it in a completely different way that day from

whatever reason, I suppose. I mean, those are the breakthrough moments that must really thrill you. Yeah, I have several really dear archaeology friends who are, you know, studying things they've studied for years and years, and suddenly they realized that that wall was completely built in a different way than they thought it was. And this is the realm that archaeologists, anthropologists exist in. It's fascinating. I just really invite people to go out there and see these things because your appreciation for all indigenous peoples and the settlements that came long before Europeans arrived here, just skyrockets. I mean, really, when you really look at the creativity, never mind everything else about this stuff, that's cool. Aaron Wright is a preservation anthropologist who works at the nonprofit archaeology Southwest in Tucson,

Arizona, working with descendant communities on heritage matters and landscape conservation efforts. He is the author of the award-winning book, Religion on the Rocks, Ho-Kam Rock Art and Ritual Practice, and Social Transformation. He's the editor of the forthcoming Sacred Southwestern Landscapes, Archaeologies of Religious Ecology. Aaron, it was a pleasure to meet you. I can't wait to see the next piece of rock art. I will look at it more open eyes. Absolutely.

It's great to be with you. I look forward to seeing Al in the Hewa sometime soon. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.