| Summary: |
This lavishy illustrated volume is the first overall survey of Indian rock art in America. In sixteen pages of color reproductions and 150 superb black-and-white photographs and drawings, it presents an extraordinary variety of subjects, styles, and techniques. Rock Art of the American Indian, a comprehensive and handsome treatment of an intriguing subject, will be welcomed by aficionados of art, anthropology, archaeology, and early Americana, and by travelers and vacationers in search of the unusual. The text identifies motifs and their prob- able meanings, correlates them with regional and tribal cultures and migrations, and locates the major sites of rock art throughout the continent. The author himself has visited most of the sites he describes, photographing, copying, and taking notes during a 12,000-mile journey. He has reviewed and condensed all the literature about Indian rock art, tells how it is dated, and describes the best ways of recording and preserving it. Indian rock paintings and carvings - numbering possibly some 15,000 sites - are scattered throughout every part of North America; but they are most numerous in the West, where rocky mountain ranges and protruding cliffs offered smooth surfaces to medicine men and artists. Vividly revealing the concerns of primitive man, they abound in fertility symbols, dream and spirit figures, clan and power symbols, magic spells for hunting. Some show the prehistoric spear, a weapon that preceded the bow by many thousands of years. Others depict bowmen; still others, warriors and horsemen of a time after the white man came. Hand prints of long-vanished men and even children are numerous, as is the "bear-track" sign, Migrations south and east may be traced by the thunderbird, while the presence of the plumed or horned serpent east of the Mississippi connects the Creek and Cherokee cultures with the high Indian civilizations of Mexico. In the middle of an Arizona desert there is a complex maze exactly like the mazes found in Crete; and all over the South- west appears the humpbacked, phallic flute- player with his bag of songs an Indian Till Eulenspiegel - trickster and stealer of wives. Some of this lively work is naturalistic; some, stylized; some, abstract. It may be "pecked" into, or carefully drawn or brushed onto stone, or scrawled like a doodle. In the caves of the Santa Barbara - Tulare region of California the common color combination of red, black, and white explodes into a magnificent abstract polychrome. Isolated examples of Indian rock art have been reported for centuries, starting with Père Marquette, who noticed water monsters on an Illinois cliff in 1673. The rock art of the American Indian is a part of the legacy of primitive man, along with the caves of Alta- mira and Lascaux and the Tassili frescoes in the Sahara Desert. Time has swept away the world of all these artists, and we may not fathom the precise meanings of their work, but we may enjoy and respond to it as long as our modern world respects and guards their wilderness cliffs and caves."-- |
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