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AMBIGUOUS IMAGES
GENDER AND ARCHAEOLOGY SERIES
Series Editor: Sarah Milledge Nelson, University of Denver

This series focuses on ways to understand gender in the past through archaeology. This topic is poised for
significant advances in both method and theory, which in turn can improve all archaeology. The possibilities of
new methodological rigor as well as new insights into past cultures are what make gendered archaeology a
vigorous and thriving subfield.
The series welcomes single-authored books on themes in this topical area, particularly ones with a compara-
tive focus. Edited collections with a strong theoretical or methodological orientation will also be considered.
Audiences are practicing archaeologists and advanced students in the field.

EDITORIAL BOARD
Philip Duke, Fort Lewis College
Alice Kehoe, Marquette University
Janet Levy, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Margaret Nelson, Arizona State University
Thomas Patterson, University of California, Riverside
K. Anne Pyburn, Indiana University
Ruth Whitehouse, University College London

BOOKS IN THE SERIES

Volume I In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches, Sarah Milledge Nelson and Myriam
Rosen-Ayalon, Editors
Volume 2. Gender and the Archacology of Death, Bettina Arnold and Nancy L. Wicker, Editors
Volume 3. Ancient Maya Women, Traci Ardren, Editor
Volume 4 Sexual Revolutions: Gender and Labor at the Dawn of Agriculture, by Jane Peterson
Volume S Ancient Queens: Archaeological Explorations, Sarah M. Nelson, Editor
Volume 6 — Gender in Ancient Cyprus: Narratives of Social Change on a Mediterranean Island, by Diane Bolger
Volume 7 Ambiguous Images: Gender and Rock Art, by Kelley A. Hays-Gilpin

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Prospective authors of single- or coauthored books and prospective editors of anthologies should submit
a letter of introduction, the manuscript (or a four-to-ten-page proposal), a book outline, and a curricu-
lum vitae. Please send your manuscript/ proposal packet to

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AMBIGUOUS IMAGES

Gender and Rock Art

ee

KELLEY A. HAYS-GILPIN

DE
ZALTAMIRA
PRESS

A Division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Walnut Creek * Lanham * New York * Toronto * C ocford
ALTAMIRA PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hays-Gilpin, Kelley, 1960—

Ambiguous images: gender and rock art / Kelley A. Hays-Gilpin.
p- cm.—(Gender and archaeology series; v. 6)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7591-0064-0 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 0-7591-0065-9
(pbk.: alk. paper) ;
I. Rock paintings. 2. Petroglyphs. 3. Cave paintings. 4. Sex in art.
S. Art criticism—Sex differences. 6. Art appreciation—Sex
differences. 7. Feminist archaeology. 8. Feminist art criticism.
I. Title. II. Series.
GN799.P4H38 2004
709’ .O1’13—dc22 2003018965

Printed in the United States of America

™ : : Vee bb : ; :
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
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NISO Z39,48-1992.,
CONTENTS

ees "i

List of Figures

Foreword by Sarah Milledge Nelson

Preface

CHAPTER I

Rock Art and Gender on the Margins

CHAPTER 2

Recognizing Sex and Gender 1S

CHAPTER 3

Engendering and Degendering Paleolithic Europe’s Cave Paintings 43

CHAPTER 4

Regendering Fertility Shrines in the West 65

CHAPTER 5

Separate Spheres: Who Made Rock Art? 85

CHAPTER 6

Life Cycles and Puberty Rites 107

CHAPTER 7

“Maidens” and Flute Players in the Southwest 127

CHAPTER 8

Sacred Landscapes and Social Landscapes

vi CONTENTS

CHAPTER 9

Women, Men, Ritual, and Rock Art 16S

CHAPTER 10

Shamans with History 187

CHAPTER II

Taking Rock Art Seriously 209

Bibliography 219
Index wot

About the Author 249

FIGURES

#4

Figure I.] Rock engravings in Scandinavia, showing association of

males and weapons.
Figure 2.1 Ambiguous genitals, including possible birthing imagery.
Figure 2.2 An “appendage” may have indicated a penis, birthing, or a
vaginal emission such as menstruation, depending on
orientation, Australia.
Figure 2.3 Gender conventions in Navajo rock art.
Figure 2.4 Phallic flute players in Southwest Puebloan rock art and
pottery.
Figure 2.5 The sexless and the minimally sexed: Archaic rock art in
the Southwest.
Figure 2.6 Vedda paintings from Sri Lanka, first published in LOLI.
Figure 2.7 Two kinds of people: males and females, or two kinds of
males, mature and immature?
Figure 2.8 Man riding horse, Joliet, Montana.
Figure 2.9 “Lizard Men,” Petrified Forest National Park and vicinity,
Arizona.
Figure 2.10 Figures with a penis, Southwestern United States.
Figure 2.11 Figures with a vagina, Southwestern United States.
Figure 2.12 Female figures placed around natural holes in the rock.
Figure 2.13 Figures with breasts.
Figure 2.14 Ambiguous breasts.
Figure 2.15 Arnhem land figure with red dots on breasts.
Figure 2.16 Sex indicated by body shape, Australia.
Vill LIST OE FIGURES

Figure 2.17 Pregnancy and birth, some with placenta and umbilicus. 33
Figure 2.18 Small deer inside large deer, Arizona. 34
Figure 2.19 Small figure inside large figure: pregnancy or indwelling
spirit?
Figure 2.20 Possible depictions of menstruation, Arizona.
Figure 2.21 Figure arranged around natural red stain in rock, possibly
signifying menstruation, Arizona.
Figure 2.22 Possible depictions of sexual intercourse, Southwestern
United States.
Figure 2.23 Possible depictions of intercourse involving humans and
animals, Arizona.
Figure 2.24 Intercourse between human males and animals, Europe.
Figure 2.25 Figures joined by elongated penis, Western and
Southwestern United States.
Figure 3.1 Lithograph published before the 1879 discovery of
Altamira and Pleistocene cave wall art in Europe.
Figure 3.2 Stallion appears to mount a mare, bas-relief, La Chaire a
Calvin, France.
Figure 3.3 Engraving of a female figure, Cussac, France.
Figure 3.4 Combination bison—female anthropomorph with vulva,
Chauvet cave, France. SI
Figure 3.5 Two reclining female figures from La Madelaine compared
to two reclining, spread-leg, erotic postures assumed by
models in Playboy magazine. 54
Figure 3.6 Some comparisons of sketches of common erotic poses
from Playboy magazine with some common female postures
in Paleolithic art. 54
Figure 4.1 Female figure, Peterborough, Ontario, Cada: 69
Figure 4.2 Female images from a variety of Western sites. 70
Figure 4.3 “Yont” rock, Jamul, California. 71
Figure 4.4 Copulating figures, Rochester Creek, central Utah. Fe)
Figure 4.5 Vulvaforms at the Chalfant Site, California. Te
Figure 4.6 “Sea Goddess” petroglyph, Baja California. 74
Figure 4.7 Phallus-shaped beam of light moving across petroglyphs,
Cueva Halcén, Baja California. 76
 Eis OF PGURES 1X

Figure 4.8 Cave of Life, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. ia,
Figure 49 Pomo cup and groove rock art, Bachelor Valley, California. 81
Figure S.1 Panel of abraded bison and deer tracks, North Cave Hills,
South Dakota.
Figure 5.2 Abraded grooves for making and sharpening awls, French
Creek, Black Hills, South Dakota.
Figure Se Buftalo cow and calf, with grooves and vulva forms,
Ludlow Cave, South Dakota.
Figure 5.4 Dichotomous decorative styles in Basketmaker portable
items and rock art.
Figure 6.1 A group of the Mono Crater petroglyphs.
Figure 6.2 Columbia Plateau paintings associated with girls’ vision
quest.
Figure 6.3 Diamond chain paintings in southern California.
Figure 7.1 Hopi woman dressing hair of unmarried girl.
Figure 7.2 Figures with hair whorls in rock art from various localities.
Figure 7.3 Figures with hair whorls on pottery.
Figure 7.4 Figure with hair whorls underlying mud wall attachment
from a storage structure, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, with
radiocarbon date probabilities.
Figure 7.5 Figures with hair whorls paired with figures holding U-
shaped stick; white, yellow, and red paint.
Figure 7.6 Ambiguous figures with hair whorls.
Figure 7.7 Probable depictions of menstruation, Lyman Lake,
Arizona.
Figure 7.8 “Maidens” paired with phallic flute players.
Figure 7.9 Mother of Game Animals, Middle Little Colorado River.
Figure 7.10 Male figures in the Southwest.
Figure 7.11 Flute player—like figure from Pahi 27, Tanzania, Africa.
Figure 8.1 Male—female pair, Basketmaker II period, southeastern
Utah.
Figure Ow Symbols of the Navajo Hero Twins.
Figure 8.3 Petroglyphs at the First Menses Site, Hot Creek Valley,
Nevada.
Figure 8.4 Tripartite organization of Shoshonean cosmography.
x LIS OF FIGURES

Figure 8.5 Ghost Water Woman petroglyphs near Thermopolis,

Wyoming. LOY,
Figure 8.6 Rock art at Vingen, Norway. 158
Figure 8.7 Landscape with rock art at Vingen, Norway. 160
Figure 8.8 Family groups in Hawaiian rock art. lol
Figure 8.9 Piko holes at Puuloa, Hawai. 162
Figure 9.1 Komari (vulva) figures, Easter Island. 166
Figure 9.2 The “White Lady of the Brandberg,” neither white nor a
lady. 169
Figure 9.3 Engraving of an eland with both male and female neck and
abdominal lines, Krugersdorp District, South Africa. 174
Figure 9.4 Painting of female puberty rite with Eland Dance?
Drakensburg, South Africa. 176
Figure 9.5 Human-—eland therianthropes, South Africa. 177
Figure 9.6 Dance group with female shamans, South Africa. LI9
Figure 9.7 Painting of curing rite with trance dance? Lonyana,
Kamberg, South Africa. 138]
Figure 9.8 Therianthropic (human/ animal) female figure with
weapons. Willcox’s Shelter, Drakensberg, South Africa. 182
Figure 10.1 Neolithic elk figures, southern Siberia. Loy
Figure 10.2 Bronze Age or Aeneolithic masks with animal features,
Minusinsk Basin. 193
Figure 10.3 Iron Age deer stone, Transbaykal-Mongolian type. LOS
Figure 10.4 Female and animal figures, Mongolia. 201
Figure II.1 Aboriginal engravings at Fishman Site, Beacon Hill,
Sydney, Australia, with poem by David Campbell. 218
FOREWORD

SARAH MILLEDGE NELSON

$a vd

AM VERY PLEASED to introduce Ambiguous Images: Gender and Rock Art as the
seventh volume in the Gender and Archaeology Series. These books have
done a great deal to engage researchers and students with the topic of gender
in archaeological settings. Like the other books in this series, this one creates new
paths for others to follow. Kelley A. Hays-Gilpin doesn’t cut the path with a
machete, however; she cuts it with a scalpel and a fine sensibility for detail. She
dispassionately probes the explanations that have been put forward about gender
and rock art, and without posturing, she shows better ways to think about both
topics and to discriminate between more and less likely interpretations.
Gender and rock art are beginning to emerge from their reputations as “soft”
archaeology, partly because interpretive archaeology has, in general, gained recent
currency and partly because the topics have been better theorized. This book
should help both topics gain further respect as a direct result of Hays-Gilpin’s
clear and reasonable style of writing. Writing about the intersection of these two
topics requires a keen eye for detail, as well as an avoidance of sweeping general-
izations and misplaced analogies. Hays-Gilpin has produced a book that is
thoughtful and judicious about gender and rock art. She shows how neither topic
is the exclusive terrain of amateur enthusiasts, and she does so without putting
down the amateurs or losing her professional focus. She does not spare misguided
interpretations, but she does always note the strengths of the points of view she
finds inadequate.
By now most archaeologists recognize that some of the interpretations of rock
art inserted present gender stereotypes into the past. But simply reversing those
interpretations has never been the right answer to a serious scientific study of the
past. Since images of women and men have been important fodder for early
XII FOREWORD

attempts at “finding” gender in the archaeological record, this book is particularly

important. The despairing question of “where do we start?” was answered with
images of people, as well as sexed bodies, with spatial distribution and artifacts
further behind. Some of these pioneering attempts with images are now seen as
flawed and, as noted in the title, ambiguous. How to steer between the Scylla of
wishful thinking and the Charybdis of thoughtless application of present gender
stereotypes is carefully probed in this book.
The reader has in hand a wise guide, a thoughtful analysis, and a good read.
PREFACE

xs

INTEND THIS BOOK to explain gender and feminism to those who love rock
|= and to explain rock art to those who study gender arrangements. This
book is mostly about why I think studying gender arrangements of the past
is interesting; why feminism provides a useful way of thinking about people in
the past and the texts that have been written about them; and why feminism ts
not, in fact, about burning bras. I also want to introduce specialists in gender
studies to rock art, a topic that few professional archaeologists and anthropolo-
gists have taken seriously. I don’t know if it’s possible to serve two masters as
such, but this whole book is nonetheless about working between the cracks in
categories we have learned to take for granted.
A few years ago, Sarah Milledge Nelson, Mitch Allen, and David Whitley
challenged me to pull together several ideas that I had been juggling in short
articles on rock art, gender, the history of feminist theory in archaeology, and so
forth. Some of those shorter articles are refigured here. Their content and style
was much improved by careful attention from a number of helpful editors, to
whom I extend my thanks. Parts of chapters I and 2 appear in Christopher Chip-
pindale and Herb Maschner’s Encylopedia ofArchaeological Theories, and the astute
reader will note some overlap with a 2001 article entitled “Feminist Scholarship
in Archaeology,” whose midwives were Christine Williamson and Alison Wylie.
A somewhat longer version of chapter 4 appears in Picturing the American Past, edited
by Christopher Chippindale, David Whitley, and Larry Loendorf. Some parts of
chapter 6 appear in Rock Art and Culture Processes, edited by Solveig Turpin (2002).
A version of chapter 7 appears in a volume on the archaeology of children in the
American Southwest edited by Kathryn Kamp (2002). Bits of chapter 9 appear
in my contribution to Women and Men in the Prebispanic Southwest, edited by Patricia
Crown (2000), and in my contribution to Reading the Body, edited by Alison Raut-
man (2000). Chapter IO is a summary of Esther Jacobson’s The Deer Goddess of

Xl
XIV PREBAGCE

Ancient Siberia (1991). I have not covered all the points of her elegant and compli-
cated study, nor have I added to her more recent and in-depth contributions; but,
with her generous permission, I have extracted a few of the main points for my
own purposes, liberally sprinkling the chapter with my own commentary, for
which Dr. Jacobson is, of course, not responsible. Evelyn Billo, Margaret Conkey,
Elisabeth Culley, Linea Sundstrom, and David Whitley provided invaluable edi-
torial feedback on a number of the chapters. My talented and generous illustrator,
Pat McCeery, translated ancient art into drawings that are as beautiful as they are
accurate and easy to read. Rupestrian Cyberservices and Robert Mark saved the
day more than a few times with expert photography and computer graphics skills.
I am grateful to so many members of the Society for American Archaeology
Rock Art Interest Group, American Rock Art Research Association, Interna-
tional Rock Art Congress, the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, the Rock-Art-
I discussion list, Gender and Archaeology Conferences, and my students at
Northern Arizona University (I can’t begin to name them all to thank them per-
sonally). A very great number of individuals offered up their wisdom, located
references, and contributed to a database of information, images, and illustra-
tions—many of which are presented here. Many thanks to Lucinda Andreani, J.
Louis Argend-Farlow, Eveyln Billo, Todd Bostwick, Christopher Chippindale,
John Clegg, Jean Clottes, John Coles, Meg Conkey, Elisabeth Culley, Claire Dean,
Marcia-Anne Dobres, Thomas Dowson, Eve Ewing, Julie Francis, Donna Gil-
lette, Peggy Grove, Dale Guthrie, Bud Hampton, Ken Hedges, Bill Hyder, Esther
Jacobson, Jim Keyser, Jane Kolber, Georgia Lee, David Lewis-Williams, Larry
Loendorf, Gro Mandt, Steve Manning, Robert Mark, Charlotte McGowan,
Marit Munson, Pat McCreery, Kelvin Officer, Linda Olson, John Onians, Carol
Patterson, Peter Pilles, Claudette Piper, Michael Pollard, Linda Powell, Mick
Robins, Bonny Sands, Polly Schaafsma, Marilyn Sklar, Dennis Slifer and the
Museum of New Mexico Press, Ben Smith and the Rock Art Research Institute
at the University of the Witwatersrand, Edward Stasack, Christine Stevenson,
Linea Sundstrom, Delcie Vuncannon, Henry Wallace, Donald Weaver, David
Whitley, Maria Nieves Zedefio, and others mentioned in figure captions. Field
work was made possible by the National Park Service (thanks especially to the
staff at Canyon de Chelly, Petrified Forest, and Chaco Canyon), the USDA For-
est Service, Bureau of Land Management, the Navajo Nation Historic Preserva-
tion Department, the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Brantley Baird and other
private landowners, some of whom wish to remain unnamed. Northern Arizona
University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Graduate Affairs pro-
vided funding for a research assistant, Lucinda Andreani, in the initial stages of
 PREFACE XV

research for this project. We both extend thanks to all the people of the Hopi
Tribe who shared their wisdom, cautionary advice, and enthusiasm with us over
the last several years. Finally, Mitch Allen, Sarah Nelson, Michael Marino, and
their minions at AltaMira Press patiently and generous supported me through the
production of this volume.
 70
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Rock Art and Gender on the Margins I

HY A BOOK ABOUT rock art and gender, two of the most marginal
topics imaginable to archaeologists today? Because the most exciting
ideas often emerge at the fringes of accepted disciplinary practice.
This book is about two formerly dubious subfields of archaeological study, and
it is about how rock art and gender intersect on some of the most promising
frontiers.
Unul recent decades, few professional archaeologists studied rock paintings
and engravings, collectively known as rock art, and even fewer studied gender.
Archaeologists traditionally viewed both topics as intractable to scientific
research, especially under the science-focused “new archaeology” and “processual
archaeology” paradigms of the 1960s through the early 1980s. So why explore
these topics now? Certainly not because everything else has been done. There's
still plenty to learn about how ancient peoples made a living; what they ate; how
they used technology to adapt to changing environments; how their communities
evolved, merged, and fissioned; and how their states rose and fell. But some
archaeologists also try to learn more about what people in the past thought and
felt; they study how their belief systems, as well as their physical environments,
shaped their social relationships, all of which encompassed gender, seniority, kin-
ship, class, and ethnicity. We want to know more about their symbolic land-
scapes, how they visualized the cosmos, and how the day-to-day experience of
“being in the world” shaped their beliefs as well as their behavior. Such questions
have always captivated members of the general public, but archaeologists have
taken them on reluctantly.
Scholars once viewed gender as a mere linguistic classification (masculine,
feminine) based on an analogy with biological sex (male, female). Words for
things that have no sex can still have gender, such as la luna (the moon, feminine )
and el sol (the sun, masculine). Biological sex was viewed as unchanging, inflexible,
incontestable, and therefore of little interest in studies of past cultural systems.
2 CHAPTER I

Gender likewise attracted little attention because gender in language was thought
to be largely arbitrary and capricious.
Rock art was long viewed as the product of individual activity, from idle
“doodling” to the production of emotionally satisfying “art for art’s sake.” At
best, paintings and engravings might represent the products of belief systems that
varied too widely to be of interest in generating “laws’’ of human behavior.
Because placing rock art in chronological frameworks is difficult, especially via
widely accepted chronometric techniques such as radiocarbon and tree-ring dat-
ing, many archaeologists, even those who are interested in art and religion, have
dismissed rock art studies as unproductive.
As a young student trained in the science of archaeology, I immediately dis-
covered, through my own field research, that rock art and gender are interesting
topics. I had the good fortune to discover the work of innumerable iconoclastic
scholars who insisted that we avoid projecting present-day assumptions and biases
about gender and art into the past. They provided evidence that gender arrange-
ments vary a great deal more than previously thought and that rock art exhibits a
great deal more logical patterning than we used to suppose. Even better, I discoy-
ered that rock art often plays roles in the active construction of human gender
arrangements, through initiation rituals, by signaling ethnic and territorial identi-
ties, by manipulating a gendered spirit world, and by picturing a gendered cos-
mos. Investigating gender arrangements is one way to begin because gender
actively structures not only social relationships but also belief systems, ritual prac-
tice, and the way people think about the natural world. Gender is an abstract
concept, but the enactment of gender arrangements often has material and behav-
ioral correlates that we can study. Sometimes rock art expressed ideas about gen-
der and functioned within practical or ritual contexts in which gender played
important roles. People often expressed aspects of their belief systems by making
rock art in their landscapes. Some used rock art to influence the perceptions and
behaviors of others, as in initiation rites and the territorial marking of boundaries,
shrines, and trails. Sometimes, then, these two marginal topics coincide to show
us something new about the past.

Rock Art Studies: The “Lunatic Fringe”

Rock art appears in many parts of the world and in many contexts. Rock art
provides one particularly important line of evidence for ancient beliefs because it
is embedded in the landscape; it comprises pictures of things experienced in the
physical world and in the spiritual worlds of trance, ritual, and myth. A great deal
of rock art was made in ritual contexts. Some were made to inscribe information
 ROCK ART AND GENDER ON THE MARGINS © 3

of various kinds onto boundaries and other important landscape features. Rock
art, then, can help us understand the ritual practices, ideological constructs, and
social identities of prehistoric peoples. However, if we were to set aside for the
moment the painted pebbles, tombstones, and portable plaquettes and blocks, we
would discover that most rock art stays where it was painted, engraved, pecked,
ground, or carved—that is, on cliffs, in caves, on large boulders, or on flat rock
outcrops that remain invisible till one walks over them. Rock art is one way of
marking the landscape, shaping the landscape, and encoding it with meaning.
Long after the people who made it have gone, we can still study the spatial and
formal relationships among rock art sites; other loci of human activity, such as
burials and habitations; and natural features of the landscape, such as water-
courses, high and low places, game trails, and the progressions of shadow and
light that mark the changing seasons.
The anthropological study of rock art has lagged behind that of other media,
such as painted pottery, figurines, and textiles. This lag results partly from the
difficulty of placing rock art into chronological frameworks (Dowson 2001) and
partly from avoidance of the topic by professionals who see rock art as the pur-
view of a “lunatic fringe” prone to uncritical identification of alien invaders, lost
alphabets, treasure maps, and complicated astronomical formulas in rock art
imagery. I suspect the study of rock art has been gendered as a feminine enterprise
by many professional archaeologists who tend to view themselves as the “cowboys
of science,” the manly men who dig in the dirt and resurrect the lives of ancient
big game hunters (Gero 1985). One professional archaeologist recently quipped
to a friend of mine that he wasn’t interested in Chaco Canyon’s rock art: “that
girlie stuff” is much less interesting than just about anything else in New Mexico
prehistory he might care to investigate. In fact, both men and women have taken
part in recording and analyzing rock art in Chaco Canyon in about equal numbers
over the last century, but few of them have had degrees in anthropology or archae-
ology. Rock art research is not, in fact, done by “girls” but mainly by avocational
archaeologists, art historians, studio artists, and others who might be called rock
art enthusiasts. It’s not the gender of the investigator that makes rock art “girlie”
stuff. What we are seeing here is a gendering of subject matter and activities
based on a hierarchy that values men, “hard” science, academics, and professional
archaeologists, over women, art, agency-based archaeology programs who often
focus on public interpretation and recreation, and avocational archaeologists.
This way of thinking values archaeology as science over the art historical, psycho-
logical, and aesthetic approaches of many I have characterized here as rock art
enthusiasts. Western culture assigns masculine gender to people and activities
considered superior to others. Inferior-ranked people and activities will then be
4 CHAPTER I

gendered feminine because of their perceived subordination or inferiority, not

because of any inherent connection with sex roles or physical characteristics.
Not only members of the “lunatic fringe” but many professionals as well,
beginning with nineteenth-century ethnographers, have long promoted some
rather simplistic interpretations of rock art based on sex and gender stereotypes.
For example, some rock art sites the world over have been identified as “fertility
shrines,” dedicated to promoting human pregnancy and childbirth, plant and ant-
mal fertility, and gendered relationships among terrestrial and celestial phenom-
ena, such as sexual penetration of the Earth Mother by the Sun or Sky Father.
Gender, then, has been a part of rock art studies for many scholars, professional
and avocational, for a very long time.
Today, a few scholars think studying rock art can tell us something about
gender, and we think understanding something about gender can help us interpret
rock art, or at least help us to identify some of its functions and contexts. But to
what extent are previous interpretations supportable? Do they reflect ancient gen-
der ideologies, or are they projections of present-day stereotypes and assump-
tions? What can we really learn about past gender ideologies and gender roles
from the systematic and comparative studies of rock paintings and engravings?
And can we learn more about ourselves in the process of melding the marginal
and contentious topics of gender and rock art?

The “Feminist Fringe”

An archaeology of gender emerged in Scandinavia in the 1970s to replace taken-
for-granted assumptions about the roles of men and women in the past with a
more thorough, critical review of the archaeological evidence (Bertelson, Lille-
hammer, and Naess 1987).' Critical, interpretive, and feminist archaeologies have
been slow to catch on in the United States, but many archaeologists now under-
take to answer questions, rather than make assumptions, about gender arrange-
ments in the past. A few archaeologists specialize in this endeavor, and a number
of good method-and-theory reviews and case studies are currently available as
well (Bruhns and Stothert 1999; Gilchrist 1999; Hays-Gilpin 2000c; Nelson
1997; Nelson and Rosen-Ayalan 2002; Sorenson 2000).
In feminist “standpoint” epistemology, the experience of being a woman on
the margins of Western society affects what one knows, how one knows, and how
one “does science”—including doing archaeology (Harding 1986; Wylie and
Conkey in press). Not every woman’s experience will be similar; race, ethnicity,
age, and class may have more influence than gender. Even the experience of not
being taken seriously as a scientist can affect archaeological practice. An old femi-
 ROCK ART AND GENDER ON THE MARGINS — $

nist joke says “women have to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously.”
(That always reminds me of another joke, one a bit more subtle: “How many
feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” No matter what the answer, the
punchline is “That's not funny.”) Many women, together with working-class men
and men of color, are pushed to higher standards of rigor than middle- and
upper-class white males. Many feminists accept that the disenfranchised often
become highly attuned to how difference plays out socially (usually to one’s dis-
advantage; hence, not an empty exercise, not fun, and not funny). In particular,
women (as well as men of color) may become attuned to hierarchical dynamics
in the academy and the business world. A woman’s “angle of view” from the
margins toward the center is more likely to reveal the status quo—the reasons for
questioning it and the strategies for resisting it—than the view of the heterosexual
male researcher who situates himself at the center, or norm, of academic practice.
As a result, “Drawing on their own perspectives, some feminists are creating
an archaeology concerned less with hierarchies and meta-narratives, and more
with the observation of detail, complexities, and local or personal experience”
(Gilchrist 1999, 29-30). Janet Spector, for example, includes not only standard
accounts of artifacts and features in her explicitly feminist monograph on excava-
tions at a historic Dakota village, but she also provides a narrative about her own
archaeological training, how she became interested in her particular topic, and
what it was like to work with living descendents of the people who once lived at
the site (Spector 1993).
Margaret Conkey, who in the 1980s pioneered the growing subfield of “gen-
der archaeology” in America, explains that it was necessary to degender the past
before we could engender it: a first step was to deal with pervasive androcentrism
(Conkey 1993). Ultimately, feminist archaeology should be dangerous and trans-
formative, questioning fixed disciplinary arrangements, including the basis of
knowledge itself. Roberta Gilchrist (1994, 193) writes, “Gender archaeology not
only brings us new perspectives on the past, it should encourage us to re-evaluate
our lives in the present and consider the possibility for change in the future. The
contribution of gender to archaeology is to enable a more comprehensive, human-
istic, and sensitive study of the lives of men and women in the past.”
Traditional scholarship presents men as gender-neutral, the norm against
which women are compared. For feminists, gender includes the cultural condi-
tioning of both sexes; men, too, are gendered. We can study masculinity in the
past as well as the present. Replacing a male-centered archaeology with a female-
centered one accomplishes nothing, and “until we start treating male roles as well
as women’s as explicitly gendered, man will remain the human norm in most of
our minds, woman a case for special study” (Dommasnes 1992, 12). “Masculi-
Ge CHAP TERE

nist” studies in the social sciences focus on the masculine subject, and they insist
on divergent, multiple masculinities rather than binary oppositions. Bernard
Knapp proposes that “any serious debate on gender within a social archaeology
must engage both feminist and masculinist perspectives, reconceptualize the cate-
gories within which we construct the past, and define new and alternative modes
of archaeological discourse and interpretation” (1998, 35). This means exploring
not just how male dominance over women is constructed and maintained, but it
also means studying power relations among men and how hegemonic masculinit-
ies arise and change.
Today proponents of “queer theory,” such as South African rock art
researcher Thomas Dowson, argue that views from the margins toward the center
actually define what we consider central versus peripheral. Queer views, views
from the margins, encompass not only alternative sexualities and genders but any
view and many views (Dowson 2000). Dowson argues that the marginal position
of rock art research relative to mainstream “chronocentric” archaeology is a dif-
ference rock art researchers should not only accept but embrace: “using rock art
does lead to different constructions of the past” (Dowson 2001, 324). “A queer
perspective empowers us to think about what is often the unthinkable—be it in
terms of practice or representation” (2001, 325).

Gender: History of an Idea

The concept of “gender” comes from a grammatical term, referring to the catego-
rization of nouns in many Indo-European languages as masculine, feminine, or
neuter. Feminist social scientists, such as Gail Rubin, borrowed the term “as a
way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes”
and a way to highlight the “fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on
sex” (Scott 1986, 1053). Gender refers to relationships between concepts of male
and female, masculine and feminine, men and women; it leaves open the possibil-
ity of there being more than two categories and even a spectrum. Anthropologists
sometimes define gender as “the social values inscribed on sex.” What “sex” is
must also be debated, but sex is usually viewed as pertaining to the body. Most
cultures recognize differential distribution of penises, vaginas, uteri, lactation,
semen, menstruation, pregnancy, upper body strength, and the ability to sexually
penetrate or be penetrated. The significance of that patterning varies among past
and present cultures, however. Gender inheres in human bodies and grave offer-
ings; sexed skeletons and their accompanying tools, adornments, and other per-
sonal items play important roles in the archaeological study of gender. But
architecture, tools, rock art, and even faunal and floral remains may have been
 ROCK ART AND GENDER ON THE MARGINS — 7

gendered to those who manipulated them in the past, resulting in patterns we can
recognize today.
Feminists in the 1970s through the 1980s deliberately separated the concepts
of gender and sex, assigning gender to a social realm and sex to a biological one.
Biology is not destiny; therefore, the concept of sex is insufficient to describe
human variation. Most of the differences we attribute to “natural” sex differences
in Western cultures are culturally constructed. “Gender,” then, not only chal-
lenged the fundamentality of fixed, binary male-female classifications of social
persons, but it also accepted a dualistic biological distinction called “sex.” Many
scholars in the 1990s even questioned the male—female classification of physical
bodies as well as the oppositions between sex and gender, sex and sexuality, body
and mind, materialism and idealism.
Gender can be studied using any kind of archaeological data, but no simple
rules or methods exist for studying gender. Although gender is a universal struc-
turing process, there are no “gender universals.” Gender’s content, expressions,
and functions vary. For instance, its functions may vary in different societies and
at different times—to organize labor, to organize sexuality, to facilitate finding
appropriate sexual and marriage partners (which may or may not be the same), to
facilitate enculturation of offspring, and to generate and regulate ranges of varia-
tion at any level of social integration. Gender categories are continually produced
and reproduced through various types of discourse in which women and men,
and sometimes others outside or between these two categories, actively control
resources, production, and reproduction. The relationships of gender to other
social structuring principles—seniority, class, labor specialization, organization of
reproduction—are also mutable and negotiable. Gender studies should be about
relations and processes, not fixed categories.
Not everyone in a society is gendered in the same way or to the same extent.
Gender is relational—one is always gendered for someone (Dommasnes 1996,
8)—and how we gender ourselves may not always be how we are gendered for or
by others. Slaves and war captives, placed outside society, may not be gendered
to their masters. Children may be outside gender until society genders them
(Joyce 2000a). Therefore, although most societies have two categories that trans-
late reasonably well into “masculine” and “feminine,” many have additional cate-
gories. Beyond assigning most sexed bodies and reproductive roles to broad
categories, not much else can be taken for granted. We therefore cannot make
assumptions about gender arrangements in past societies, but we must investigate
gender and think with gender when investigating all kinds of archaeological ques-
tions.
Sociocultural anthropologists see gender in action in living societies; archaeol-
8 CHAPTER I

ogists, however, find little of use in the concept of “gender” unless we can link
the concept to the material remains it is supposed to elucidate (Dommasnes
1996, Sorenson 2000). Methods must include all the usual archaeological tech-
niques for meticulous and systematic recording and analysis of many kinds of
evidence; cautious use of analogy, ethnography, and historical records; and con-
stant attention to assumptions, prior expectations, and theoretical frameworks.
Archaeologists cannot engage with embodied individuals as ethnologists can.
Therefore, focusing more on gender ideology, gender systems, and gender roles generally
works better for archaeologists than trying to reconstruct gender categories and
identities (Dommasnes 1996). Some archaeologists can begin with ethnographic
or historical cases, identifying tools and facilities associated with activities usually
performed by men or women, then looking for archaeological traces of these
activities to study gendered divisions oflabor, as well as gender prestige and hier-
archy.
When no direct historical links or appropriate ethnographic analogies are
available with which to pursue an “informed” approach to gender, we have to
rely on multiple strands of evidence in the archaeological record. Archaeologists
exploring gender arrangements tend to work outward, from sexed skeletons to
other kinds of data or from depictions of sexed bodies. The skeletons themselves
can be examined for occupational stress markers, such as patterns of arthritis and
muscle attachments, infection or nutritional stress, and dietary changes (Bridges
1989; Cohen and Bennett 1993; Hollimon 1991, 1992). We can examine burial
assemblages for consistent associations with sexed skeletons, then look for similar
items in nonburial contexts, such as depictions of weapons, tools, and ornaments
in rock art. For example, Liv Gibbs (1987) examined burials in Denmark to dem-
onstrate that archaeological data can elucidate gender roles and relations, and to
explore how gender arrangements changed from the Neolithic through the Bronze
Age. By recording all items associated with sexed burials—assuming that burials
were accurately sexed from the skeletal remains—she discovered that a few kinds
of items were associated exclusively with male or with female skeletons. Assuming
that gender correlates with sex frequently enough to be an acceptable given, Gibbs
then assigned a gender category to unsexed burials and cremations by their associ-
ation with these items. She next found that groupings of items in hoards (items
deposited together at one time, apparently as ritual offerings) are often similar to
items deposited in burials, so a similar gender classification could be applied to
hoards. She expanded the analysis further to include tools for agriculture, food
processing, and craft production; and to representations of human figures in rock
engravings (similar to those depicted in figure 1.1) and figurines. An association
between males and weapons, tools, and agriculture, she concluded, was displayed
 ROCK ART AND GENDER ON THE MARGINS 9

Fig. 1.1 Rock engravings in Scandinavia, showing association of males and weapons (top row),
and figures with weapons but no genitals (bottom row), inferred to be masculine by comparison.
From Mats Malmer, A Chorological Study of North European Rock Art (1981, figs. 18 and 23),
reprinted with permission.

overtly until the Later Bronze Age, when male-associated items in burials began
to emphasize personal appearance in the form of dress fittings and ornaments.
Female burials became ambiguous at best. At the same time, a visible symbolic
relationship between females and agriculture emerged via hoards. Male hoards
ceased. Gibbs suggests that burying females without their diagnostic grave goods
may have become a way to make a social statement about men’s control of women
and their agricultural labor.
Material culture does not passively reflect society, but it can be manipulated
to change gender constructs. Archaeologists, therefore, must engage with the con-
cepts of reflexivity and materiality (Sorenson 2000). John Barrett writes:

The archaeological study of gender does not depend upon a method-

ological breakthrough rendering specific gender activities visible in the
‘archaeological record.’ It must be founded instead upon the critical
realization that gender relations and conflicts are historical forces. From
this position, we can recognize that gender discourse is always struc-
LO” (CHAPTER

tured by control over certain human and material resources. (Barrett

1988, 14)

Methods for studying gender must include multiple lines of evidence, critical
examination of assumptions, and recognition of individual variation and volition,
as opposed to reliance on normative concepts. One must employ modes of infer-
ence beyond hypothesis testing, such as hermeneutics, relational analogies, and
cautious use of the direct historical approach.
We first have to rethink categories of analysis, not only in gender archaeology,
but in the broader endeavor of“social archaeology.” Rather than treating catego-
ries like “gender” as natural givens, we have to consider how they are constructed
(Roberts 1993, 16). We have to develop methods that do not rely on static,
dualistic classifications of bodies, artifacts, spatial arrangements, or interpretive
concepts, such as public—private and sacred—secular. The history of gender studies
in archaeology demonstrates a variety of approaches, and no single orientation
prevails today.

Gender Imagery, Iconography, and Ideology

The anthropological study of rock art must include understandings of imagery,
iconography, and ideology. Imagery refers to pictures, ones meant to represent
something in the physical or nonphysical world (a topic explored in more depth
in chapter 2). Looking at iconography involves images with shared meanings and
the presumption of their power in particular cultural contexts. “Ideology” is an
ideal representation of the world that attempts to “explain” the way things are.
Ideology often obscures, hides, or contradicts the changes, conflicts, and tensions
inherent in social, political, and even economic processes. Evidence for ancient
ideologies is ambiguous by its very nature. For example, depictions of humans
going about daily life (or what may look to us like daily life) rarely reflect “real”
activities; rather, they often illustrate stories, myths, and rituals. Art (defined
broadly here) may reflect prevailing ideas about how things should be, or it may
resist or attempt to subvert dominant ideals. Visual representations, artifact deco-
ration, and dress—like other important forms of art not accessible to archaeolo-
gists, such as songs and prayers—are created by individuals in the context of a
physical and social environment. Art becomes a part of this environment, where
it in turn influences behavior and ideas.
In middle-scale societies, such as those of village farmers, the concept of ideol-
ogy is more difficult to apply because no authoritative version of the world was
necessarily imposed by elites on commoners. Where no dominant, bounded,
 ROCK ART AND GENDER ON THE MARGINS Ly

“official” version existed, worldview can be difficult to reconstruct. Ritual behav-

ior, nonetheless, is (and was) very much part of the social and political fabric of
society at every scale. Ritual, including some rock art production, not only rein-
forces existing roles and statuses—including, and sometimes especially, gender
roles—but it also provides a context for the active negotiation of change and
accommodation of variation in such roles.
To learn something about gender by studying rock art, and something about
rock art by studying gender arrangements, I have explored several kinds of data
for this book: depictions of sexed humans and animals and their contexts; sites
known through ethnographic records to have been used for gender-specific initia-
tions, fertility practices, and other rituals with gendered meanings; and figures
identified through oral traditions as having gender attribution. In addition, I have
also evaluated texts produced for over a century by ethnographers, archaeologists,
art historians, and others who attributed gendered meanings and functions to
rock art.

Exploring Sex and Gender with Rock Art;

Exploring Rock Art with Sex and Gender
One might hope that recognizing rock art with sex and gender content ts simply
a matter of identifying genitals in pictures of people and animals. Not so, alas,
because there are many ways to draw males and females, and these may not be
the only sexes recognized in any given culture. Furthermore, sex and gender do
not always coincide; there may be more than two genders, perhaps a multidimen-
sional spectrum; and the sex—gender dichotomy itself is flawed. Chapter 2 illus-
trates these problems and explores some possible solutions, with examples from
many localities worldwide.
In the history of rock art research, gender has always been an important
theme, but researchers have hidden gender behind simplistic assumptions about
fertility shrines, universal sex roles, and Mother Goddess—Mighty Hunter arche-
types. Chapters 3 and 4 take apart the “fertility” theme in the history of rock art
research; they illustrate attempts to look at the functions of rock art and the
structure of art sites; and they expose how Western biases pervade many of these
approaches. Chapter 3 traces the roles of gender in the history of research on
cave paintings of Paleolithic Europe, from hunting magic to structuralism to the
shamanism hypothesis. Chapter 4 takes up the “fertility shrine” theme in the
western United States, where researchers projected Eurocentric interpretations
and gender stereotypes onto diverse Native American cultures.
Who made rock art? Does it matter? Chapter 5 reviews ethnographic and
12 CHAPTERS a

archaeological evidence for men’s, women’s, and children’s rock art production.
First, I demonstrate that most rock art research in the past rests on the assump-
tion that only men made rock art; then I provide ethnographic evidence to the
contrary. Do men and women use different styles and images? Do they make rock
art for different purposes? Or do other categories of social differentiation—such
as occupational specialization, ethnicity, or status—play more prominent roles
than gender does in rock art production? Establishing whether and how men’s
and women’s rock art varies is a more difficult enterprise because the answer to
this question differs in each case. One.of the most controversial aspects of rock
art research is the degree to which the ritual specialists many anthropologists call
“shamans” were responsible for rock art production in many parts of the world.
Although both men and women can become shamans in some parts of the world,
in other cultures, direct contact with the spirit world is often the privilege of
people of one gender; in addition, some shamans must either change their gender
or blend aspects of more than one gender to pursue their vocation.
Chapter 6, “Lifecycles and Puberty Rites,” shows that rock art is an active
component of socialization in some cultures. Rock art does not just reflect life-
ways; it “acts back” on gender arrangements. Making rock art and viewing rock
art result in part from gender arrangements, but both acts also affect continuity
and change in gender arrangements. This process is most visible in the context of
initiation rites, in which children are “made” into adults with particular gender
identities. Sometimes making rock art is an important part of puberty rites and
other kinds of initiations; sometimes analogy with body painting, tattooing, and
other kinds of art production is useful for examining how cultures use art to
help make or shape gender and other identities. Chapter 7 explores images of
“maidens”—pubescent but as yet unmarried women—in Southwestern Pueblo
rock art and other media. These images were apparently not made during puberty
rites. Their contexts on pottery and in rock art, since at least a.p. 300, show that
they have persisted as a key symbol in Puebloan culture throughout major changes
in community and ritual organization. Of course, no book on rock art and gender
would be complete without a discussion of so-called Kokopelli, the fashionable
phallic flute player of the Southwest, who probably has more meaning to contem-
porary Euroamericans than he ever did to Pueblo ancestors.
Cultures engender the bodies of their members, but they also engender the
world around them. Chapter 8 illustrates the gendering of sacred landscapes. Peo-
ple the world over assign gender to landscapes and aspects of their cosmos. Often,
but not always, they assign a feminine identity to the earth and the moon, and a
masculine identity to sun and sky. Caves may be gendered feminine, and moun-
tains masculine. Yet these assignments do not necessarily determine who performs
 ROCK ART AND GENDER ON THE MARGINS 13)

what activities in such places or who has ritual responsibilities for them. From
the Great Basin to Scandinavia to Hawaii, making rock art on the landscape is
one way to mark the landscape with gendered meanings and to structure ritual
and subsistence activities of community members.
Association of rock art with particular places in the landscape is not limited
to demarcating territory and cosmological arrangements; it may also be associated
with ritual and oral traditions that recount histories, events, and migrations.
These stories may take place in deep “mythological time,” or “Dreamtime,” and
they may involve events those enculturated in the Western (European) tradition
characterize as “supernatural.” In addition, rock art may mark the landscape with
images of ritual events and activities that “actually” took place in what we think
of as “real” historical time. Chapter 9 explores the roles of gender in several recent
debates about the relative contributions of myth and ritual to rock art imagery.
In contrasting the roles of cultural norms—such as “fertility” versus individual
experience and expression—I attempt to show that both generalizing and particu-
larizing approaches can coexist productively, if not in harmony.
Having established that rock art can be intimately connected to social proc-
esses such as gender arrangements, I now pose the question “Can rock art provide
a productive line of evidence for tracing long-term histories of human social and
ideological lives?” In chapter 10's case study, transformations of gender iconogra-
phy and ideology are traced from the Siberian Neolithic to the present day. Esther
Jacobson’s (1993) Siberian rock art research begins with questions about the ori-
gins of Iron Age Siberian “deer stones” and complex animal imagery in Scythian
metalwork. Her exploration leads her back in time to Neolithic petroglyphs of
female elk overlooking major rivers; it proceeds through complex human—animel
combinations of the Bronze Age, through the Iron Age Scythian and Early
Nomad traditions; finally, it culminates with a complex of ancient beliefs persist-
ing in some present-day native Siberian societies under a recent overlay of Sha-
manism.? Throughout this volume, “shamanism” emerges as one of the most
important and controversial concepts in rock art interpretation all over the world.
Jacobson’s study gives shamanism a history, a face, and a good deal of gender
trouble.
In conclusion, chapter 11, “Taking Rock Art Seriously,” summarizes main
points, but more important, it lays out some directions for future research, with
an emphasis on multivocality—'‘many voices,” reflexivity, and what Henrietta
Moore has called “a passion for difference.” I briefly discuss the current roles of
rock art research and tribal consultation in the southwestern United States, and |
ask whether rock art research can be relevant to contemporary indigenous people.
By the end of this volume, it will have been necessary to destabilize almost all the
14 CHAPTER I

carefully defined terms—sex, gender, art, shaman, “traditional,” and “women’s

business”—that have gone before.

Notes
I. The conference proceedings took a long time and a long struggle to publish. Note the
rock art chapter by Mandt (1987).
2. Note that Shamanism (capital S$) refers to Siberian Shamanism and that shamanism (lower-
case s) is a reference to the general concept itself. (See, in particular, chapter 10.)
Recognizing Sex and Gender y,

ka

The obvious fact of biological differences between men and women tells us noth-
ing about the general social significances of these differences, and although human
societies all over the world recognize biological differences between men and
women, what they make of those differences 1s extraordinarily variable,

—HENRIETTA MOORE (1994)

OT ALL ROCK ART is about gender in any interesting way. In trying to

pick out rock art that might be about gender, it’s tempting to emulate
archaeologists who begin studying gender arrangements by classifying
human skeletons according to sex: They work outward to associations with grave
goods; then they move to other kinds of objects that seem to have been used to
mark gender categories and even help create or shape gender categories—
including rock art. We can then proceed to look for patterns that indicate traces
of activities and work areas. We might, then, begin with figures that have some
indication of their sex—that is, as defined as the biological differences between
two categories, male and female. These might include breasts, vaginas, penises, or
different distributions of body fat and muscle. We could then work outward to
consistent associations with hair and clothing styles, body decoration, tools, actiy-
ities, and perhaps correlations with particular animals or even geometric figures.
We might call these features markers of “gender” because they are culturally con-
structed and culturally specific. Next, we might look for consistent associations
between genders and the spatial arrangements in or among rock art panels, sites,
and landscapes.
Unfortunately, in many areas of the world, the majority of rock art pictures
we take to represent humans lack any identifying sex characteristics, and in other
areas, different physical features were selected for indicating sex. With surprising
frequency, one encounters figures with something fancy between the legs that
16 CHAPTER 2

can’t be readily assigned to one of two categories, neither penis nor vagina (figure
Zak:
Even differences in how drawings are oriented can affect interpretation (figure
2.2). Artists of different times and places adopted different conventions for indi-
cating sex of human figures—that is, when they indicated sex at all. Although
individual figures may be ambiguous and difficult to read, unambiguous genitals
can be depicted in various ways. Other features associated with sex, such as breasts
and shape of hips, might be indicated either instead of genitals or in addition to.
If an artist wanted to indicate the sex of a figure, most traditions comprise at least
a few ways of communicating this information so that even viewers many centu-
ries later can recognize the intention. Ambiguous figures, then, may be incompe-

Fig. 2.1. Ambiguous genitals, including possible birthing imagery: a, possible breech birth scene,
Puako, Hawaii (Lee and Stasack 1999: 32, fig. 3.51; courtesy of Georgia Lee and Edward Stasack,
Easter Island Foundation); b, “hermaphrodite’’ engraving, Basin Track site, Sydney, Australia
(drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin, after photo in Stanbury and Clegg 1990, 66); c, near Bernalillo,
New Mexico (from Slifer 2000, fig. 37); d, Anderson Mesa, near Flagstaff, Arizona (photodrawing
by Kelley Hays-Gilpin); e, near Moab, Utah (photodrawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin); f, Skutumpah
Canyon, Utah (from Slifer 2000, fig. 58)).
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 1

Fig. 2.2 Two views of the same drawing, but its ‘‘appendage’’ may have indicated a penis,
birthing, or a vaginal emission such as menstruation, depending on orientation. Executed in wet
white pigment in a rock shelter near Nerriga in southeastern New South Wales, Australia. Drawing
by Patricia McCreery, after Officer (1991, 114).

tent renderings, may realistically represent sex-ambiguous individuals, or may have

had important meanings in their original cultural context, which we cannot “read”
outside that context. A search for such meanings begins with a search for patterns,
for repetition of certain forms in certain settings.
What is not easily grasped is the reading of the gender of human or humanlike
figures in rock art. Where no indication of genitals is observable to us, figures
still might have had gender to their makers. Perhaps the lack of identifiable sex
or gender features means that some other aspect of identity, such as age, was
emphasized instead. Perhaps social identity as a man, woman, or other category
could be read from clothing, hairstyle, or body posture by those who shared a
cultural code for marking genders. For example, in Navajo rock art (figure 2.3),
as in sand paintings, female holy people have rectangular faces, and male figures
have round faces (Schaafsma 1992, 28). This convention has no basis in a natural
model; therefore, it is not “readable” without ethnographic or other contextual
evidence, such as clothing and tools.
In the case of rock art depictions of humans and humanlike figures, both
sex and gender are culturally and historically constructed categories. This concept
is difficult for lay readers raised in Indo-European cultures including Euro-
American culture. We are not looking at actual biological organisms with defined
reproductive roles and modal chromosomal and hormonal patterns, nor are we
18 CHAPTER: 2

Fig. 2.3. Gender conventions in Navajo rock art. Male personages (such as the one on the left)
have round faces, and female ones (right) have square faces. Drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin, from
photo by Karl Kernberger in Schaafsma (1992, fig. 33).

looking at fossil organisms; rather, we are seeing depictions contrived to represent

social categories that are relevant within particular cultural contexts. Depictions
of penises, vaginas, and breasts do not have the same meanings in all times, places,
and ritual contexts. Nonetheless, I will cautiously begin to use the term “sex” to
refer to figures with visible, readable biological characteristics that can be classi-
fied as male, female, intersex, or ambiguous/nonsexed figures that may have been
intended to depict more than one kind of person. “Gender” will refer to social
identities inscribed on sex, which include masculine, feminine, and any number
of other gender categories or positions along a continuum. I will employ this term
when inferring gender identity from clothing, hairstyles, and other evidence apart
from apparent depictions of genitalia.
This chapter provides some groundwork for understanding why it isn’t easy
to classify rock art figures in sex and gender terms, how we can go about it any-
way, and why it’s important to try.
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 19

Problem Pictures
The problem is at least fourfold:

1. Sex and gender were not always important to the artist; so they may not
be represented at all, or they might be represented inconsistently or 1ncom-
petently.
2. When sex was important to the artist, we can’t always recognize its depic-
tion today, because different cultural traditions deployed different solu-
tions to depicting sex differences.
3. Most important, when viewed from a worldwide perspective, sex and gen-
der are not the straightforward, binary classifications our Anglophone per-
spective leads most of us to expect, as discussed in the previous chapter.
4. Discussions of the polysemantic nature of symbols and the roles of delib-
erate ambiguity are necessary. What about, for example, the perennial
question of disembodied “vulvatorms” in rock art: are they female genitals;
bird or animal tracks; seeds, nuts, or seashells? Could they represent more
than one of these at the same time?

I will address the first three issues in turn here, but I will take up this last problem
in chapter 3, where I will discuss how some researchers are accused of finding sex
and fertility themes everywhere in Europe’s most ancient art.

Is Sex Always Salient?

If you received your formal education in America, Europe, or Australia, you prob-
ably remember art history books and films that presented the Venus of Willen-
dorf as an icon of art’s primitive beginnings. She represents our early ancestors’
concern with ideal womanhood, a symbol of fertility and plentitude. The rotund
physiques in Rubens’ paintings were no improvements, just a more recent itera-
tion of an “ancient archetype.” But whose archetype? Theirs, in the past, or ours,
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? The majority of Paleolithic figurines
lack breasts, buttocks, vulvae, and other sexual characteristics. They don’t make
it into the textbooks. We shall take up the topic of Upper Paleolithic European
female figurines and rock art depictions of women, men, and genitalia in chapter
3
Likewise, in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, everyone’s
favorite rock art icon is “Kokopelli,” the hunchbacked flute player with the excep-
tionally large phallus (figure 2.4). But not all flute players are phallic, not all
phallic figures have flutes, and most aspects of the Kokopelli myth as it pertains
20 CHAP TERE

Fig. 2.4 Phallic flute players in Southwest Puebloan rock art and pottery: a, Comanche Gap,
New Mexico; b, Little Colorado River, Arizona; c, La Cienega, New Mexico; d, San Juan County,
Utah; e, Little Colorado River, Arizona; f, Hardscrabble Wash, Arizona; g, Seven Mile Draw,
Arizona; h, late Jeddito Black-on-yellow pottery, Hopi area, circa A.D. 1400s (may not have a
flute, but otherwise seems to belong here); i, late Jeddito Black-on-yellow pottery, Hopi area,
circa A.D. 1400s. Drawing by Patricia McCreery.
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 21

to popular culture are ours, not part of traditional Hopi culture (see chapter 7;
see also Malotki 2000).
The degree, kind, and frequency of sexual representation in Southwestern
rock art actually varies a great deal. Archaic period rock paintings of anthropo-
morphic (human-shaped) figures usually lack any indication of sex characteristics,
in contrast to the later art styles of horticulturalists, who indicated sex fairly regu-
larly, though not in a majority of figures. Well-known Archaic traditions of
southwestern North America, including the Barrier Canyon style of Utah and
the Pecos River style of Texas, emphasize very large figures with elaborate body
decoration and headdresses, but they virtually never have penises, vaginas, or
breasts. Yet contemporaneous Great Mural style pictographs of central Baja Cali-
fornia and petroglyphs of the Little Colorado drainage in similar environmental
settings sometimes sport what appear to be penises (figure 2.5) and breasts. Sex
was important to depict for some geographically contiguous hunting and gather-
ing traditions but not for others.
Attention to gender is stronger in some languages than in others. The sort of
question archaeologists traditionally pose is whether they can make correlations
among kinds of depiction, modes of subsistence, language groups, and belief sys-

ee

'
A] cay
als
N
s
%:
i!
idiietiadid

Ng
s! egy

Fig. 2.5 The sexless and the minimally sexed: Archaic rock art in the Southwest. Left, Barrier
Canyon figure with typically rounded, legless torso (after Grant 1967, 118). Right, Horned figure
from Baird’s Chevelon Steps, near Winslow, Arizona, with possible penis (photodrawing by Kelley
Hays-Gilpin).
22, GHAPTIERSZ

tems. We must also ask whether a lack of emphasis on depicting sex means that
sex differences were not important; that supernatural beings who lacked sex dif-
ferentiation were being depicted, rather than mortal humans; or whether the mak-
ers simply took for granted that all the figures were male or all were female.
Perhaps some other culturally specific characteristic indicated a figure’s gender
identity, and the meaning of those features is lost to us today. Even ethnographic
interviewing may not produce replicable results. Vedda people of Sri Lanka iden-
tified some rock art figures as women and others as men, arguing that pictures
of women have a line pointing upward from the head, indicating a hair knot.
Ethnographers C. G. and Brenda Seligman were unable to discern a difference.
They also observed that in practice, Vedda men and women both wear their hair
“unkempt” and that although women wear a knot, many men do as well “as a
matter of convenience.” They lament that the lines radiating from the head look
as much like loose hair as they do hair knots. In a drawing made on paper for the
Seligmans (figure 2.6), the artist identified three women, but the “body has been

Fig. 2.6 Vedda paintings from Sri Lanka, first published in 1911. The first set was said to depict
women because of their hair style. The second set also depicts women, according to the painter.
From Seligman and Seligman 1969/1911).
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 23

carried down too far so as to project downwards between the legs,” again con-
founding their efforts to “read” sex into Vedda art (Seligman and Seligman
1969/1911). Clearly, indicating a figure’s sex takes some effort, and indicating
it so that it could be recognized by most viewers takes some thought as well.
Rock art researchers in Scandinavia have tended to interpret “phallic” figures
as male and all others as female, by default. This interpretation stems from and
reinforces the Western view of men as the norm, and women as defined by the
lack of maleness—that is, by the lack of a penis. Yates (1993) argues that human
figures in Scandinavian rock art might just as well depict two kinds of men
(mature/immature or watrior/nonwatrior) as male—female pairs (figure 2.7).

The Picture Problem

Every artist endeavoring to represent a three-dimensional figure—such as a man,
woman, or animal—in two dimensions, such as on a rock surface, must solve “the
picture problem” (Chippindale 1992, 2000). We can recognize what a picture ts
supposed to be a picture of because the picture is the same shape as the object in
some essential way, though not in every detail. The picture has to preserve some
of the geometry of the original (Chippindale 1992, 271), but exactly which
details will be included to render the picture recognizable can vary. For example,
many nineteenth-century Plains Indian artists depicted horses with four legs

Fig. 2.7 Two kinds of people: males and females, or two kinds of males, mature and immature?
Pair of figures: left with long hair, right with weapons and male genitals. Slange, Bohuslan,
Sweden. Bronze Age. From Coles (1995, fig. 10.3e), courtesy of John Coles and the Institute for
Comparative Research in Human Culture, Oslo. © John Coles.
24 CHAPTER 2

because horses have four legs; and when a man was depicted riding a horse, he was
given two legs because men have two legs. The solution to the picture problem for
Plains artists was to show the second leg on top of the horse, sometimes with the
line indicating the horse’s back cutting across this leg (figure 2.8). The solution
to the picture problem selected by European artists was to show only one of the
rider's legs because the second leg is hidden by the horse and the viewer was
assumed to have known that. The “trade-offs” are that unwary European viewers
of a Plains drawing might mistake the man’s posture astride the horse for a side-
saddle pose, thereby confounding a feminine pose with a subject's wearing mascu-
line trousers; however, Plains viewers of the European drawing might mistake a
two-legged man for a one-legged man.
What characteristics did ancient artists choose to signal the sex—that is, the
biological form—of a human figure? We have several choices: penises, testicles,
vaginas, breasts, the shape and distribution of muscle and fat on the body, and
depictions of sex-linked activities and postures such as childbearing, menstrua-
tion, lactation, and sexual penetration or being penetrated (note that being pene-
trated is not exclusive to females), Hlustrations here come primarily from the
American Southwest to demonstrate the very wide range of solutions deployed
by artists in a single area. Examples from other parts of the world are included to
show that very different solutions were deployed elsewhere, thereby demonstra-

Fig. 2.8. Man riding horse, Joliet, Montana. Probably Crow. Drawing courtesy of James D.
Keyser, from Keyser and Klassen (2001, fig. 3.1).
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 25

ting an overall unity to the Southwest corpus at a general level; but I have not
attempted to discuss or depict every possible solution to the picture problem.

PENIS Rock art researchers typically interpret a single straight line, or slightly
curved line, between the legs of ahuman figure as a penis. In the American South-
west, stick figures sport such lines in many lengths (figure 2.9). In a broad survey
of sexed figures in Colorado Plateau rock art, Judith Warner concludes that “there
is a little problem in knowing just where to draw the line between a figure with a
vision of grandeur and one that starts being a lizard” (1991, I). When the length
of his appendage exceeds that of the legs, it will probably be labeled a lizard, or
in recognition of its ambiguity, a “lizard man.” Given that most katsina perform-
ers in the historic Pueblos wore a fox pelt hanging from the back of the belt and
nearly reaching the ground, could a broad line between the legs represent a fox
tail rather than a penis (Holmes 2002)? Artists sometimes differentiated tails and
penises by providing more specific shapes, such as knob on the end of a penis;
addition of testicles also clarified the matter (figure 2.10).

Fig. 2.9 “Lizard Men,” Petrified Forest National Park and vicinity, Arizona. Drawing by Patricia
McCreery.
26 GHAPTIERS2

Fig. 2.10 Figures with a penis, Southwestern United States: a, penis with knob, San Juan
Reservoir, New Mexico; b, with testicles, Cottonwood Creek, Arizona; c, Petrified Forest,
Arizona; d, Velarde, New Mexico; e, Big Gap Lake, New Mexico; f, Petrified Forest. Drawings by
Patricia McCreery.

Figures with penis and testicles are often highly exaggerated, but in these cases
penis length never exceeds leg length, suggesting that “lizard men” do in fact refer
to reptiles or human—reptile combinations, like those described in Zuni creation
stories in which ancient human ancestors had tails and webbed feet before losing
these features when they emerged into this world (Young 1988, 122). Note that
a flaccid penis may be depicted frontally or in profile, but an erect penis “reads”
more accurately in profile. In simple line drawings, a front view of an erect penis
may be confused with a vagina (figure 2.1b) but this conflation might be useful
as a symbol of potency pertinent to all humans. One of the most unambiguous
depictions of a human male is the probable Magdalenian-era figure in the French
cave of Le Portel, which was drawn around a protruding stalagmite that provides
him with a three-dimensional penis (Bahn and Vertut 1988, 86).

VAGINA Rock art in the American Southwest shows a staggering array of solu-
tions to depicting female genitals. One may draw between the legs one, two, or
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER — 27

three short lines; a dot, circle, oval, horseshoe shape, a pair of long curved or wavy
lines, a short line, or some combination of the above (figure 2,11). One may also
position the figure over a natural hole or crack in the rock, or one may make an
artificial hole or groove by drilling or pecking the rock (figure 2.12).
Legs may be spread apart to varying degrees to make space for depiction of
genitals; spread legs may also indicate sexual receptivity or readiness to give birth,
as many (mostly male) researchers have suggested (Fraser 1966 provides a fasci-

- i e 2. :

Fig. 2.11 Figures with a vagina: a, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona; b, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona; c,
Buckskin Gulch, Utah; d, Petrified Forest, Arizona; e, San Juan River, Utah; f, San Juan County,
Utah; g, Petrified Forest, Arizona; h, Navajo County, Arizona; i, Hawaii. Drawings by Patricia
McCreery.
28 GHAPTBR 2

as
an
i
4
a

Ge 3
gr
‘ Vea? Sng
% Be hump 4
ih in lava “

Figure 2.12 Female figures placed around natural holes in the rock: top, Puako, Hawaii (from
Lee and Stasack 1999, fig. 3.31, courtesy of Georgia Lee and Edward Stasack, Easter Island
Foundation); bottom, Cedar Point, Utah. Note the carrying basket next to the female figure; oral
traditions in the Southwest and Great Basin often associate such baskets with women’s plant-
gathering work and with emergence of the first people—that is, a womblike symbol (photo by
Michael Pollard).

nating review). Some researchers term this the “spread-eagle,” or “Hocker,” pose.
This latter term comes from the German word for a skillet with legs that squats
over the hearth (Ekkehart Malotki, personal communication, 2001). Despite its
nonhuman and nonsexual etymological source and despite the fact that male fig-
ures also assume this pose, my informal survey of rock art researchers suggests
that the term “Hocker” has come to imply female sexual receptivity, or “display-
ing her wares” to many (the frequent misspelling “hawker” is especially interest-
ing). I make no such interpretation here; rather, | suggest that interpretation of
this pose be taken up on a case-by-case basis, considering contextual evidence,
time- and space-specific stylistic conventions, and the picture problem. In some
cases, the pose may simply reflect rectilinear style conventions derived from tex-
tiles and basketry, where fabric structure constrains one’s options for clearly
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 29

depicting legs. Sometimes the intent may have been to emphasize symmetry of
the legs with the arms and, in the case of male figures that assume this posture,
perhaps symmetry of the head with the penis.

BREASTS AND LACTATION | Few human depictions in North American rock

art indicate breasts, but some do (figure 2.13a and c). A few figures that seem to
depict males also include nipples (figure 2.14a). In contrast, the use of breasts to
indicate female figures is very frequent in Australian rock art, often in combina-
tion with vaginas, wide hips, and other features. In solid one-color figures, breasts
must be shown either in profile or by spreading them to the sides of the torso in
a frontal view (figure 2.13d and f).
Depictions of lactation in Southwest rock art are equivocal and rare. Steven
Manning has suggested that the Basketmaker—period lobed-circle figure of the
Four Corners region, especially southeastern Utah, represents a symbolic confla-
tion of womb, lactating breast, and pit house floor plan, prefiguring the later

Fig. 2.13 Figures with breasts: a, Black Point, Utah; b, Hawaii; c, Petrified Forest, Arizona; d,
Laura, Australia; e, Wandjina figures, Kimberley region, Australia (after Walsh 1999, fig. 336); f,
Northern Territory, Australia. Drawings by Patricia McCreery.
30 .CEAP TIER a2

o(3) .
b. 9
Fig. 2.14 Ambiguous breasts: a, figure with breasts and a possible penis, Canyon de Chelly,
Arizona (photodrawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin); b, lobed circles in a variety of contexts within a
single petroglyph panel in southeastern Utah. Lobed circles may represent wombs, lactating
breasts, or turquoise-inlaid wooden pendants; or they may have had several meanings depending
on context (from Manning 1992, reprinted with permission).
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 31

Puebloan kiva floor plan of that region (Manning 1992; figure 2.146). As this
figure appears in many contexts, the proposition is intriguing but difficult to eval-
uate. Some researchers suggest that dots on the full breasts of Arnhem-land
female figures in Australia represent milk ducts (Chaloupka 1993, 167), and
because such dots also appear on stomachs and legs, they may represent not only
the ability to lactate but areas of potentiality associated with having reached
puberty (Grove 2002, 127; figure 2.15).

BODY SHAPE In the American Southwest, stick figures and rectangular and
triangular bodies predominate, so hips, buttocks, waists, and muscle shape are
rarely indicated. Not so in many other world rock art traditions, where curvilinear
body shapes were favored and where body shape was often emphasized, as in
many Australian (figure 2.16) and southern African styles. In some styles, differ-
ent proportions of hips to shoulders, rather than rounded shapes, provide the
most salient information about sexual identity.

PREGNANCY AND BIRTHING Depictions of pregnancy that include placen-

tas and umbilical cords can be identified most reliably, but in some cases body
shape seems sufficient (figure Zle)

Fig. 2.15 Ethnographic information suggests red dots on breasts, arms, and legs indicate a
woman’s ability to lactate (Grove 1999, 241-42). Polychrome painting, Arnhem land, northern
Australia. Photo by Margaret Grove. © Margaret Grove 2003.
62 CHAPTIEREZ

Fig. 2.16 Sex indicated by body shape. Red painting, Kimberley region, Australia. Drawing by
Patricia McCreery, from photo in Walsh (2000, pl. 368).

A small figure shown in the abdominal region of a larger figure might indicate
pregnancy, but it might also depict an indwelling spirit or a shaman’s other self
(Culley, in press). In some cases, it might be the result of haphazard or deliberate
superpositioning at different times by different artists. A figure potentially inter-
preted as a pregnant deer includes antlers on both “mother” and “baby” (figure
2.18). Female reindeer/ caribou, like their mates, carry antlers, but this figure
comes from the Sonoran desert near Tucson, Arizona, an unlikely habitat for a
reindeer even if this figure dated to the Pleistocene era. We have no reason to
argue that it wasn’t done by a Hohokam farmer of the present millennium. Has
the artist put antlers on female and immature animals to distinguish deer from
dogs or other quadrupeds so that accurate depiction of species outweighs accurate
depiction of sex and age? The interpretation of “pregnancy” must certainly be
called into question here and in human depictions with similar arrangements
(figure 2.19). Context, scale, and orientation (right side up, upside down) should
be considered.
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 33

ty
b. °.
d.
Fig. 2.17 Pregnancy and birth, some with placenta and umbilicus, one with penis and testicles
below figure. Southwestern United States. Top row: a, Petrified Forest, Arizona; b, Seminole
Canyon State Park, Texas; c, Comb Ridge, Utah (from Slifer 2000, fig. 50c, d, a). Bottom row: d,
Chevelon Canyon, Arizona (drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin); e, White Rock Canyon, New
Mexico; f, Quemado, New Mexico (from Slifer 2000, fig. 55b, a).

MENSTRUATION | Elongated shapes between the legs of human figures may

not always indicate penises, especially when the shape is wavy or when the line ts
detached (figure 2.20). Some probably refer to menstruation, while others may
indicate male ejaculation, female sexual emissions, afterbirth, belt fringes, or other
clothing items. Urination cannot be ruled out, especially in the Southwest Pueb-
los, where urination was a metaphor for rain and was part of some ritual perform-
ances prior to the vehement objections of Christian missionaries 1n the nineteenth
century. Identification of menstrual blood is strengthened when the artist has
marked this emission with red pigment or drawn the figure over naturally occur-
ring red stains in the rock (figure 2.21). Even ifone has a picture that appears to
represent a menstruating female, one would do well to recall circumcision, subin-
cision, and other modifications to the penis, such as Maya autosacrifice involving
letting blood from the penis. Some, but probably not all, of these genital-bleeding
practices mimic menstruation for ritual purposes.
34 “CHAPTER: 2

Fig. 2.18 Small deer inside large deer. Pregnancy? If so, why do both ‘‘doe’”’ and ‘‘fawn’’ sport
antlers? Southern Arizona. Photo by Henry D. Wallace.

SEXUAL INTERCOURSE Depictions of sexual intercourse appear worldwide,

with remarkable variability. We might well argue that figures depicted penetrating
others are biologically male, but not all those being penetrated are clearly female;
in fact, sometimes it’s difficult to tell which of two entwined figures wields the
phallus and, indeed, whether only one phallus or two might be involved in the
encounter (figure 2.22). In the American Southwest, we see males with females,
males with males, males with animals, and both males and females engaging in
genital contact of some kind with any number of objects, creatures, or abstract
figures (figure 2.23); similar figures appear elsewhere in the. world (figure 2.24).
Female—female sexual contact is not immediately apparent in world rock art, but
it cannot be ruled out.
Depicting a sexual union between two figures is an even greater challenge than
rendering three-dimensional anatomy in two dimensions. Two frequent solutions
are showing figures in profile and showing them end to end, with emphasis on
joining the torsos at the expense of depicting legs. Frequently, the two figures are
shown a little way apart. Sometimes, in Arizona, the penis ts simply elongated to
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 2)

a. b.

Cc d e.

Fig. 2.19 Small figure inside large figure: pregnancy or indwelling spirit? a, southeastern Utah;
b, Navajo Reservoir, New Mexico (drawings by Kelley Hays-Gilpin); c, Yellowjacket Canyon,
Colorado; d, Legend Rock, Wyoming (drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin after photo in Francis and
Loendorf 2002, 101); e, Tewa warrior, Galisteo Basin, New Mexico (photo drawing by Kelley
Hays-Gilpin).

vx ©
\é
a. b.
Fig 2.20 Possible depictions of menstruation, Arizona: a, Perry Mesa; b, Lyman Lake; c,
Wupatki National Monument, Arizona. Drawings by Kelley Hays-Gilpin.
36 CHAPTER 2

Fig. 2.21 Figure arranged around natural red stain in rock, possibly signifying menstruation,
South Mountain, Phoenix, Arizona (see Bostwick and Krocek 2002). Photo by Todd W. Bostwick.
Computer enhancement, displaying only the red color channel, brings out the red stain on the
rock as a light colored streak.

join two side-by-side figures (figure 2.25); but rather than an additional conven-
tion that solves the picture problem, this arrangement may depict a story told at
Hopi and other pueblos: An unattractive man impregnates a beautiful maiden by
burying a long reed from his home in the village to the trash midden where she
habitually defecates. Then he impregnates her by threading his unusually long
penis through this tube while she squats there (Malotki 2000, 88-93; Titiev
193oD

Gender Indicators
Most cultures inscribe gender on sexual difference with different ways of speak-
ing, singing, and dancing; and with visual cues, such as clothing and hair styles,
jewelry, tattoos, and characteristic gestures and postures. These features not only
reflect ideas about gender, but they also create gender because they “act back” on
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 37

g. h. . i.
Fig. 2.22 Possible depictions of sexual intercourse, Southwestern United States: a, Petrified
Forest, Arizona; b, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; c, Waterflow, New Mexico; d, Santa Fe River,
New Mexico; e, Santa Clara Canyon, Utah; f, Tenabo, New Mexico; g, Jemez River, New Mexico;
h, Provo River, Utah; i, Inscription Point, Arizona. Drawing by Patricia McCreery, after Slifer
(2000).

beliefs and behavior (a topic taken up in more detail in chapters 6 and 7). Exam-
ples we can see in Southwestern rock art include hair styles, especially the butter-
fly hair whorls of pubescent but unmarried Pueblo women (chapter 7); women’s
string aprons or skirts; and bows and flutes, which only appear in the hands of
male or neutral figures and never in the hands of females (or rarely, if we include
historic Pueblo depictions of the “warrior woman’). In Australia, dilly bags seem
to go with females, and certain ways of dancing indicate female figures in some
southern African rock art traditions. Long hair has been interpreted as a feminine
feature by some Scandinavian rock art researchers, but Yates (1993) points out
<aey
38 GEHAPTERI2Z

C.

Fig. 2.23 Possible depictions of intercourse involving humans and animals, near the Little
Colorado River, Arizona: a and b, Inscription Point (drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin); c, Five Mile
Draw (from Slifer 2000, fig. 215).

Tee
Fig. 2.24 Intercourse between human males and animals, Europe. Left, probably a donkey, Val
Camonica, Italy. Traced and drawn by Christopher Chippindale. Right, unidentified animal from
Bronze Age—decorated stone slab in Sagaholm barrow, Sweden. After Malmer (1981, fig. 15a).
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 39)

te
Tarek
e.

Fig. 2.25 Figures joined by elongated penis, Western and Southwestern United States: a, Castle
Gardens, Wyoming; b, Jemez Mountains, New Mexico; c, Velarde, New Mexico; d, Puerco River,
Arizona; e, Jemez Mountains (from Slifer 2000, figs. 42 and 43).

that long hair might go with either sex, or perhaps with immature males. Yates
reminds us not to project present-day gender associations into the past, but to
carefully and quantitatively document patterns of association.
Unexpected combinations of features sometimes appear. Co-occurrence ofsex
features, such as a penis, and noncorresponding gender indicators, such as the
Pueblo “maiden” butterfly hair style (chapter 7), are more interesting. Given that
many cultures not only allow but encourage some individuals to take on a gender
that does not correspond with their biological sex and considering that many
mythical figures, especially creator beings, have both male and female attributes,
we should expect more than two genders to appear in rock art. Yet examples
appear rarely. Do ambiguous figures depict males who have taken on a feminine
gender identity, as happened often in Pueblo communities right into the last cen-
tury, or has this researcher misidentified the lines between the legs in figure 7.6?
Rather than indicating a penis, does the line indicate menstruation or the “tail”
of a woman’s string skirt? Or is our difficulty with such figures based on our
40 CHAPTERS 2

unwarranted assumptions about sex as fixed, static, and binary, as opposed to our
assumptions about gender as flexible and culturally constructed?

“Troubling” Sex and Gender

Most gender archaeology accepts a distinction between sex and gender, though
few agree on the exact relationship. The sex—gender duality proceeds from a
Western mind—body duality that inheres in neither biological nor archaeological
evidence. Nonetheless, when they assume that adult skeletons can be assigned to
male or female categories—as is the case about 9S percent of the time, when
the pelvis is intact—archaeologists take sex as a given, immutable, dichotomous
condition. Some archaeologists can take a direct historical approach and extrapo-
late ethnohistorically known patterns into earlier centuries. But for deep prehis-
tory, the skeletal evidence seems a reliable point of departure—certainly more
reliable than applying conventional Western presumptions about who people
were and what they did.
Researchers in many fields, including biology, currently question the ontologi-
cal status of sex, which clearly has cultural dimensions (Fausto-Sterling 2000).
They question the separation of sex as biological and gender as cultural, and they
question the binary and fixed nature of sex differences. Archaeologists interested
in sexuality cite three kinds of sources:

I. medical literature on sex differences;

2. comparative ethnography, with particular reference to Melanesian societies
in which boys are “made” into men via same-sex sexual contact (Yates
1993) and North American “Two-Spirits,” or “berdaches” (Hollimon
1997; Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang 1997; Roscoe 1998); and
3. phenomenology’s emphasis on “living in the body” and “gender as per-
formance” (Butler 1990, 1993).

Recent surveys of worldwide medical literature suggest that as many as 2 per-

cent of babies born today deviate from the “ideal” male or female morphology
(Blackless et al. 2000). Archaeologists can argue that given our usual sample-size
problems, a I or 2 percent “failure” to conform to norms is nothing to worry
about, but the frequency of intersexed births is beside the point. Norms come
from experience, and what individuals experienced in the past may or may not be
similar. Frequencies of biological sexual ambiguity are much higher in some non-
European populations, according to surveys of medical records (Blackless et al.
2000). In some populations, intersex births are frequent enough that almost
everyone in a community probably knew someone whose sex identity was not
 RECOGNIZING SEX AND GENDER 4]

clear at birth or did not appear to remain fixed over time. European and Euro-
American experience, then, may not reflect that of others, today or in the past.
Even in European history, the idea of immutable biological gender identity stem-
ming from extreme difference emerged only in the late eighteenth century, replac-
ing an ideology of sexual difference as degrees of development of shared potential
(Laquer 1987). Therefore, archaeologists must not assume that people in the past
in any region of the world saw sex as binary and fixed (Yates 1993). Ideologies
are likely to vary even more widely (Joyce 2000a, 6).
The sex—gender dichotomy is difficult to maintain in the face of the queer
critique (Dowson 2000, 2001), the biological evidence for a sex spectrum (Black-
less et al. 2000; Fausto-Sterling 2000), and the anthropological evidence that
culture is involved in constructing sex categories as well as gender. Yet to take an
extreme constructivist position by collapsing sex and gender is problematic for
archaeologists. We so often begin with the biological sexing of human skeletons
and moye outward to cultural gendering of material culture and spatial organiza-
tion. Unlike sociocultural anthropologists, we cannot directly observe or engage
with embodied individuals. Sorenson (2000, 56) argues that foregrounding the
individual artificially separates the individual from society, and doing so offers no
guidelines for analysis of society as institutions and structures, and of gender as
ideology, both normative and regulatory processes. Thus, the old anthropological
debate about relationships between specific and general, individual and society, is
not now behind us; as imperative as ever, it 1s brought into sharp relief by the
study of gender (Sorenson 2000, 14). Thus far, “there is no consensus as to the
relation between sex, gender, and difference” (Conkey 1993, 4).
Rock art studies must engage with the tension between the general and the
particular because each image is unique; yet, patterns can be discerned at every
scale of analysis. Ericka Engelstad (2001) recommends that archaeologists accept
the tension between views of the body as social construction and as a biological
reality. Body morphologies, both actual human bodies and representations in rock
art, “are ideologically coded, but they also do have a relationship to a material/
physical body.” What ts especially interesting is “the social construction of bodies
as a process over time and in different contexts,” to be investigated, not assumed
(270). She compares depictions of human (and animal) bodies in Scandinavian
rock art over a long span of time and in several geographic contexts. Even without
definitively identifying each individual figure as male, female, or intersexed, pat-
terns in form and context allow Englestad to conclude that the social construction
of sex/gender changed over the entire time period and that these changes played
important roles in interethnic relations.
So much of the content and context of rock art production and use are tied
42 CHAPTER 2

up with the gender systems of people we cannot interview nor observe directly.
We often resort to analogy to help us understand rock art; yet, the following
question still remains: which analogies are appropriate, and which result in unwar-
ranted projection of present-day assumptions into the past, assumptions that may
come from many sources?
Engendering and Degendering Paleolithic 3
Europe’s Cave Paintings

bE

It is not that “an interest in the female form is one of the most enduring
features of mankind” (Bahn 1986). Rather, I suggest that it is an interest in
seeking the female form that is one of the most enduring features of archaeology.

—MARCIA-ANNE DOBRES (1992)

SSUMPTIONS ABOUT GENDER have pervaded rock art studies since their
inception in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critical
analysis of gender systems has a much shorter history, beginning perhaps
in the 1980s. This chapter and the next trace the pervasive idea that rock art, in
at least two regions of the world, has something to do with human sexuality,
fertility, and gender. These notions, or at least the way they have been applied
and elaborated in literature about rock art, result not so much from anything
inherent in rock art or its associated ethnography but from particular approaches
to interpreting rock art. Many of these interpretive frameworks began in Europe
with infusions from late-nineteenth-century European folklore studies and eth-
nography on Australian Aboriginals. Particular networks of researchers then car-
ried sequences of explanations for rock art to the rest of the world, including the
far western United States (as discussed in chapter 4). I conclude these chapters
with discussions of how the application of monocausal interpretations has started
to come apart in recent decades, allowing new questions and interpretations to
emerge.

Upper Paleolithic Cave Art:

Definition and Discovery
A century of interpretations of Upper Paleolithic period paintings and engravings
make up the subjects of this chapter. Much of the imagery that’s been preserved

43
44 CHAPTER 3

today lies deep inside caves in France and Spain. It was made by hunter—gatherers
during the last ice age, the Pleistocene geological era, more than twelve thousand
years ago. Neither texts nor the ethnography of living European peoples can shed
light on the meanings and cultural contexts of the imagery. Whether or not “cave
art” really warrants use of the term “art” (as opposed to more cautious and precise
terms, such as “visual and material imagery”) is for the most part beyond the
scope of this discussion (but see Conkey 1987, 413, fn. 1). As this chapter pri-
marily discusses history of research, I will use the term as early researchers did.
Anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens arrived in western Europe by about
thirty-five thousand years ago, replacing, displacing, and (some believe) inter-
breeding with the Neanderthal people who preceded them. Beginning perhaps as
early as their initial arrival in Europe, they produced cave paintings, engravings in
open-air sites as well as in caves, and they carved and sculpted bone, antler, ivory,
and stone. Contrary to popular conceptions of early Europeans as “the first art-
ists,” who followed an innate, universally human drive to “make art,” image mak-
ing was unevenly distributed and varied. Pre-European art has recently been
indentified in Africa and Australia.
Most painted caves are located in France and Spain. Lascaux is perhaps the
most famous; and Cosquer, Chauvet, and Cussac, the most recently discovered.
Open-air engravings are more widespread, for example, at the Céa site in Portu-
gal. “Portable art” ranges over much of Europe, and the famous “Venus” figurines
are most frequent in eastern Europe. Upper Paleolithic artisans drew animals but
also human figures, animal—human combinations, and geometric figures many
researchers call “signs.” Some signs might represent female genitals, or perhaps
not, as we shall see. Gender has played important roles in the interpretation of
Paleolithic “art”: beginning with the projection of assumptions about gender roles
from the present into the past; and even deployment of gender, age, and class
stereotypes and symbols in the story of the research process itself.

Discovery
One of archaeology’s most beloved stories begins in Spain in 1868 with a dog
chasing a fox and falling among some boulders. The hunter who rescued the dog
found the entrance to a cave and notified the landowner, amateur archaeologist
and nobleman Don Marcelino de Sautuola, who began excavations in the cave
floor some years later. One day in 1879, de Sautuola’s young daughter, Maria,
joined him. Looking up at the ceiling of the cave, she cried out, “Mira, Papa, bueyes!
(Look, Papa, oxen!)” This story appeals at least partly because it illustrates a fairy
tale theme: by “looking with the eyes of a child” adults can see something they
couldn't see before, symbolizing a break from habitual ways of thinking.
 ENGENDERING AND DEGENDERING 45

In fact, painted caves were already known to some researchers but had not
been widely accepted as genuine and ancient. Recognizing the significance of the
Altamira paintings and similar cave art took several decades. De Sautuola had
seen collections of Upper Palaeolithic bone and antler engravings in a Paris exhi-
bition the year before and was the first to be convinced that the Altamira paint-
ings were Pleistocene in age. His critics strenuously argued that the paintings were
frauds. Only in 1902, after de Sautuola’s death, one of the most prominent skep-
tics, Emile Cartailhac, finally conceded they were genuine, in an article entitled
“Mea Culpa d’un Sceptique.” In 1903, Cartailhac brought the young French
priest Henri Breuil to Altamira to copy the paintings. Breuil launched a scholarly
tradition that has undergone many interesting transformations over the last cen-
tury.

Explanation
For about thirty years, researchers explained the paintings as “art for art’s sake,”
suggesting that all humans have an innate drive to express artistic feelings. The
artists were envisioned as the geniuses of their age, and therefore as all males.
Popular illustrations of the time depict the painters as if standing at easels, pro-
ducing portraits of animals the way a French master would address a portrait of
a nobleman (figure 3.1).
The abbé Breuil never became a practicing priest, but rather the church
allowed him to devote his life to rock art. He studied the paintings systematically
and meticulously, spending an estimated seven hundred full days of his life under-
ground. By copying the images, he came to the realization that many images were
placed in dark, inaccessible locations, where they could not have been easily
viewed. Paintings overlay earlier paintings. Densely superpositioned engravings
became undecipherable tangles of lines. Not all the art, then, apparently had been
meant for viewing. Perhaps the act of making images was more important than
the resulting pictures. Furthermore, images did not appear to be placed randomly,
the product of simple idle moments of pleasure or “doodling,” but rather they
were patterned in their placement. Breuil was convinced that the images were
made for use, that they had functioned in some way.
In 1903, the same year Cartailhac brought Breuil to Altamira, Solomon Rein-
ach used Spencer and Gillen’s 1899 book The Native Tribes of Central Australia to
explain Paleolithic art in terms of “totemism”: the notion that “primitive tribes”
believe themselves to be descended from powerful spiritual beings symbolized by
animals and other natural features or forces. Breuil, impressed with Reinach’s use
of analogy with the religious practices of modern “primitive” peoples to explain
46 CHAPTER 3

Fig. 3.1 Lithograph published before the 1879 discovery of Altamira and Pleistocene cave wall
art in Europe. Note that the then-known portable art was imagined, in part, as ‘‘easel’’ Ir image
making. From Figuier (1870); see also Conkey (1997).

the art, elaborated Reinach’s notion that the paintings could.be explained by the
Aboriginal practice of “hunting magic,” or at least by the notions of totemism
and hunting magic, as then recorded by early ethnographers. In retrospect, the
analogy is far from accurate, much less appropriate. But at the time, Australian
Aborigines provided a living “model” for equally “primitive” European ancestors.
Where Europeans continued to make technological and philosophical advances,
 ENGENDERING AND DEGENDERING 47

per the evolutionary argument of the time, Australians remained frozen in time,
allegedly practicing “universal” primitive rituals based on a trio of handy notions:
totemism, hunting magic, and fertility magic. This notion strolled happily hand-
in-hand with Sir James Frazer’s (1890) “Golden Bough” interpretation of Euro-
pean folklore and Réheim’s evolutionary psychology, also based in part on Aus-
tralian models (Réheim 1925).
Hunting magic, as described by Reinach, Breuil, Bégouén, and others, was
supposed to consist of employing “sympathetic magic” to kill prey by making
and symbolically damaging, or “killing,” images of the desired prey. Aborigines
and Paleolithic men alike supposedly believed that poking animal images with
sticks or drawing pictures of spears on them magically enables the hunter to kill
game in real life. Prey species were drawn and symbolically killed for food; preda-
tor species were drawn and killed to eliminate competition for game and to sym-
bolically dominate dangerous animals. Geometric figures could be explained as
simple drawings of weapons, traps, and snares. But this theory isn’t at all clear; in
fact,the majority of animal figures lack the addition of weapons or wounds. Truly,
the drawings comprise more animal figures than anything else, and some of them
are marked with barbed lines. But ancient artists also painted animals, such as
owls, that cannot be classified as food animals nor as dangerous predators. The
totemism interpretation takes care of these and perhaps the animal—human com-
binations as well. To explain most of the human representations (which seemed
to represent adult females) and the horseshoe and triangular-shaped geometrics,
researchers posited the third facet to the “primitive religion” trio: fertility magic.
It goes without saying that hunting magic was envisioned as practiced exclusively
by men, who hunt large game in most (but not all) cultures. Oddly enough, fertil-
ity-related rock art was also envisioned as the domain of men, perhaps because
men were already cast as the artists and the ritual practioners.
In this model, primitive people allegedly deployed sympathetic magic to
address concerns about the reproduction of animals and humans: if one depicts
lots of animals (or humans), they will magically increase their numbers in the real
world. If one depicts pregnant animals, real animals will get pregnant. If one
depicts “fertile” (i.e., rotund) women or generative organs, women will be fertile
and men will have access to lots of female generative organs. The role of prehis-
toric women in this scenario is, of course, entirely passive.
The problems with interpreting Upper Paleolithic art as fertility-directed are
many. First, the animals Breuil interpreted as pregnant are not clearly pregnant.
Horses with large bellies might be pregnant but might just as easily be well fed. I
can attest that a naive new owner of a stocky Shetland pony may be easily fooled
into thinking a little Shetland pony 1s on the way, only to discover that a bellyful
48 CHAPTER 3

of green spring grass produces the same body shape. Researchers have also argued
that the fat bellies may be simply artistic exaggerations or conventions. Some
suggest that the artists were depicting dead animals lying on their sides. When
drawing a picture of animals lying down, perspective angles emphasize the under-
belly and the feet pointing downward, as if on tip-toe, not planted firmly on the
ground,
Virtually no copulation scenes appear in the imagery—possibly one pair of
horses out of many thousands of horse images (figure 3.2), and a few on portable
artifacts. Breuil’s argument that animals depicted close together are in “precopula-
tory” poses was never sustained by subsequent research.
Ethnographically, some (non—Upper Paleolithic) rock art is indeed related to
human fertility (discussed in chapter 4). The reader will note that this art is often
made and used by women as well as men; in addition, it sometimes does, but
often does not, entail realistic representations of bodies or body parts. The rock
art that ethnography links most closely to fertility is just as often nonrepresenta-
tional (or “geometric’’) as representational.

Why and Whence “Fertility”?

The emphasis on fertility in the interpretation of Upper Paleolithic art, both
parietal and portable (especially the female figurines), probably derives from the
European “myth of the Great Mother” as much as from ethnography. The Great
Mother myth has many sources, including Sir James Frazer's compendium of
European folklore, The Golden Bough (1890); Marx and Engels’ social evolutionary
scheme, which begins with a primitive matriarchy; early psychoanalytical theory;
and the biblical equations of fertility with blessings, and infertility with curses.
The Great Mother myth pervades much of the history of European archaeology,
particularly in the Mediterranean region, so it was easily adopted by early archae-
ologists studying Paleolithic remains, in spite of a lack of evidence. At a 1985

Fig 3.2 Stallion appears to mount a mare, bas-relief, La Chaire a Calvin (Charente), France. From
Clottes and Lewis-Williams (1998, fig. 50), courtesy of Jean Clottes.
 ENGENDERING AND DEGENDERING 49

conference on “fertility cults” in Mediterranean archaeology, Colin Renfrew

explained:

The curious thing about many of these myths is that they came into
our minds, into the scholarly world that is, in the very early days of
scholarship, long before there was much evidence which might or
might not justify them. So as archaeologists we started off with the
assumption of a universal Earth Mother; you can read it in the writings
of Schliemann and others even before the Minoan civilization was dis-
covered . . . [the fact that] the circumstances that the explanation was
available before the evidence for it came to light underlines, I think,
the very hypothetical and indeed dubious nature of that explanation.
Now I do not doubt that we can with great profit discuss the possibil-
ity of a universal or at any rate Mediterranean fertility cult in the early
period. That would be an interesting hypothesis. I have rarely seen it
presented as a hypothesis, but often offered instead as an accepted
truth (although not accepted by me, and I hope it is not accepted as
an a priori truth by yourselves). (1986, 120)

EVIDENCE In Paleolithic art, as in Mediterranean art, depictions of human

females are sometimes fat, but often not. A wide range of body shape appears
when large numbers of depictions are examined (Nelson 1990; Dobres 1992);
but textbook authors indeed prefer to illustrate the “little fatties,” and many pop-
ular authors have conflated Paleolithic figurines with those of other times and
places. Sir Colin continues:

it is all too easy to observe some figure in some other part of the world,
whether nearby or distant, to recognize it as a “fat lady”, and say that
since we have fat ladies in the Maltese temples, to conclude there must
be some relationship. Well of course there is a resemblance! We live in
a world which is partly inhabited by fat ladies, after all, and so we must
not be surprised sometimes to see them represented in the iconography.
(Renfrew 1986, 120)

Finally, not all “vulva” forms clearly depict vulvas. Paul Bahn, perhaps with
tongue in cheek, argues that, as a priest, the abbé Breuil should not be credited
with particular expertise in identifying vulvas with any accuracy (Bahn 1986, 99).
Bahn illustrates an array of highly ambiguous figures that might just as easily be
horse or bird tracks (and perhaps even deliberate visual puns or metaphors), and
he points out that lack of association with human bodies should make us very
SO CHARTERS

skeptical indeed. On the other hand, a few recently discovered Paleolithic cave
images at Cussac and Chauvet (figures 3.3 and 3.4) clearly do represent women.
The Chauvet image has a vulva “in context,” so we are now better able to evaluate
Upper Paleolithic conventions for drawing bodies and genitals. But even if these
images were meant to represent women, did they mean fertility, sexuality, or
something else to their makers? How would we know?
Even the original “fertility magic” ethnographic analogy fails to hold up to
scrutiny, except as a viable but still untested hypothesis. Not only is the actual
practice of sympathetic magic highly suspect and certainly oversimplified, research
on historic hunter—gatherers suggests that they typically avoid having large fami-
lies, in contrast to farmers and herders. Hunter—gatherer parents must maintain a
high degree of mobility. They find carrying more than one infant not only bur-
densome but, in harsh climates, downright dangerous. Most practice at least one
way of ensuring that births are spaced a good four to seven years, including infan-
ticide, herbal birth control and abortion, breast-feeding for several years to sup-
press ovulation, and lengthy prohibitions on postpartum intercourse. In other
words, increasing human fertility is seldom an issue for hunter—gatherers, and the
Great Mother myth can be traced largely to sources based on the folklore and

Fig. 3.3 Engraving of a female figure, Cussac, France (drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin).
 nN

Fig. 3.4 Combination bison—-female anthropomorph with vulva, Chauvet cave, France. Photo by
Yanik Le Guillou, reprinted courtesy of Jean Clottes; see Clottes (2001, fig. 161).

religion of farmers and herders. Concern with sexuality—apart from, or in addi-

tion to, fertility—seems a more plausible place to begin thinking about sexual
imagery in Upper Paleolithic art.

From Sex to Structure

Three theories about Upper Paleolithic art—totemism, hunting magic, and fertil-
ity magic—coexisted and dominated rock art research in many parts of the world
n iS) CHAPTER 3

through the mid-1960s. These interpretations are based on the projection of

Western ideas about “primitive” people. They assume that modern hunter—
gatherers “failed to evolve” and so remain frozen in time, essentially alike all
around the world and hence useful as analogs for hunter—gatherers in the remote
past. In fact, Australian Aboriginal rock art has changed over time, and different
Aboriginal tribes have diverse beliefs and practices. The Ice Age environment was
very different from that of any tribe of Aborigines and even differed from that
of Arctic hunter—gatherers. This naive use of ethnographic analogy was at last
replaced by André Leroi-Gourhan in the 1960s.
Leroi-Gourhan, with Annette Laming-Emperaire, pioneered the systematic
study of Franco-Cantabrian cave paintings by counting, classifying, and mapping
paintings and engravings in over one hundred caves. They employed statistical
methods to search for patterns, and they applied a structuralist interpretation,
emphasizing binary oppositions between classes of imagery and spatial zones of
caves. [hey saw caves as compositions, with formally organized imagery based on
a common schema for all caves. Certain combinations of figures appear near
entrances, others in the centers, and still others in the deepest, least-accessible
reaches. They posited a basic dual division of images into two symbol sets based
on the horse—bison dichotomy and extending to other images. Leroi-Gourhan
(1968; first published in French in 1964, based on two articles published in
1958) explained the patterning as an abstract “mythogram”; but for the most
part, he declined to attribute meaning or function to the patterns. In contrast,
Laming-Emperaire thought the groupings signified social groups, but she stopped
short of endorsing the earlier “totemism” model.
In Leroi-Gourhan’s first analysis, he interpreted patterns in sexed terms, cod-
ing “narrow” signs and certain animals as masculine, “broad” signs and other
animals as feminine (oddly enough, Laming-Emeraire posited exactly the oppo-
site gender assignments for the same animals). Meanings included predator—prey
and weapon—wound dichotomies. By the 1980s, Leroi-Gourhan had dropped sex
from his interpretations, probably in response to criticism from colleagues.
Except for viewing caves as essentially feminine places, sexual valances play little
role in his later work. The exercise nevertheless represents an early attempt to
infer something about ideology through the systematic study of rock art, and it
reveals a great deal about how researchers can unconsciously infuse their interpre-
tations of the past with present-day gender stereotypes.
This work was the first attempt at systematic cataloging, looking for patterns,
and consideration of spatial organization. Leroi-Gourhan found some patterns
and consistent associations within and between many caves. He relied on the evi-
dence alone, not on ethnographic analogy, which he explicitly rejected; he was the
 ENGENDERING AND DEGENDERING 53

first to see “signs” as possible symbols, not just “parasitic lines” or incompetent
depictions of traps, huts, vulvas, weapons, and so forth. Unfortunately, other
researchers were unable to replicate many of his results, and the patterns he pos-
ited did not hold up to new discoveries. Many of his patterns couldn't be repli-
cated by other researchers using the same data. Peter Ucko and Andreé Rosenfeld
effectively demolished his conclusions in a 1967 critique, arguing that some rea-
soning seemed circular, that cave entrances we see now were not necessarily the
entrances Paleolithic people knew and used. Finally, dualism is a scheme imposed
from European cultures and languages, and is not inherent in the evidence.

Frotica
Though never a dominant interpretation of Paleolithic art, the “erotica” theory
of Paleolithic art has persisted for decades. This theory focuses on depictions of
female humans and so-called vulva depictions, and argues that males made depic-
tions of female bodies for sexual pleasure. R. Dale Guthrie (1979) suggests simi-
larities between body postures and contemporary Western pornographic
magazines by depicting selected Paleolithic drawings side by side with schematic
renderings of women posing for Playboy photographers. He seems to argue that
these poses are actually struck by sexually receptive women the world over and
that men the world over find these poses especially exciting (figures 3.5 and 3.6).
Guthrie, then, interprets images of women as pinup girls, and sculptures of
nude females as some sort of “feelies.” Guthrie argued from our own culture's
assumptions that Paleolithic men would have been most interested in food (hence
the animal depictions) and sex. Likewise, John Onians writes:
The bulging Venus figurines with enormous buttocks and pendulous
breasts, along with vulva drawn on the cave walls were undoubtedly
male art creations, for themselves or for other men... . the drawings
or carvings were made, touched, carved, and fondled by men. (Onians
with Collins 1978, 62—63)

In “No Sex, Please, We're Aurignacians,” Paul Bahn (1986) points out that
we don’t know who made the art (see also Nelson 1990 for a critique of the
“erotica” and fertility theories as applied to figurines).We don’t know what their
gender systems were like. We don't know what sexual organs symbolized to them.
There is no evidence they were obsessed with sex. Not all figurines that have been
labeled “female” clearly are, and not all figures labeled “vulvas” are even likely to
represent female genitals. Feminist critiques of these interpretations outnumber
the original erotica arguments by many pages (Dobres 1992; Gimbutas 1981;
54 CHAPTER 3

Fig. 3.5 Two reclining female figures from La Madelaine compared to two reclining, spread-leg,
erotic postures assumed by models in Playboy magazine (October 1979, German edition). From
R. Dale Guthrie (1979, fig. 13); original caption, reprinted with permission from the author.

WY)

Fig. 3.6 Some comparisons of sketches of common erotic poses from Playboy magazine
(October 1979, German edition) with some common female postures in Paleolithic art: a,
Hohlenstien; b, Petersfels; c, Laugerie-Basse; d, Les Combarelles; e, Pech-Merle; f, El Pendo.
From R. Dale Guthrie (1979, fig. 20); original caption, reprinted with permission from the author.
 ENGENDERING AND DEGENDERING 5S

Mack 1992; Nelson 1990; Russell 1991, 1993). Feminists point out that the
notion that men made representations of women’s bodies for sexual pleasure is
based on Western, heterosexist, and male-biased sexist assumptions. In what
Marcia-Anne Dobres dubs the “Prehistoric Barbie Doll” theory of Paleolithic
figurines, Onians states, “The echoes of the hunt and of love-making both point
in the direction of adolescent, or adult males. The pursuit of game animals is
usually the business chiefly of that group and clearly no other group would have
had such an interest in the female body” (1978, 14). Dobres counters that “one
need be neither a heterosexual male nor a lesbian to appreciate the female body.
In fact, it is the objectification of the female body by men in prehistory that
should be open to question rather than given ontological status” (1992, 248).
On the other hand, a few aspects of the erotica theory are worth considering,
and these can be separated from the authors’ sexist assumptions. First, Onians
correctly decouples sexual activity and fertility (1978, 12); as noted, an obsession
with fertility is an unsupported assumption for hunter—gatherers. Second, and
more important, his approach takes bodies, neuropsychology, and physical envi-
ronments into account. Art, meaning, and culture are not just “all in the head.”
There is more to art and religion than abstract thought and the graphic expression
of abstract thought. In a more recent elaboration ofhis erotica hypothesis, Onians
(2000) points out that we don’t just live by abstract schemata/structures. Bodily
sensations and experience shape our lives and our beliefs. Environment must play
some role. Onians suggests, in brief, that harsh climates like that of Ice Age Rus-
sia make one long for maternal warmth, hence the “Venus” figurines; likewise,
more benign climates (France) allow one to think of sex, hence the vulva sculp-
tures (and speaking of stereotypes, the famous French libido?). Ontans is still
assuming that heterosexual males objectified women’s bodies for sexual pleasure
then as now, that the variability among images doesn’t mean much, and that
Western concepts such as “maternal warmth,” as well as sexual pleasure, can be
projected backward thirty thousand years. I would rather see a more objective
phenomenological approach to linking sensory experience with the creation and
use of the images, but I must commend him for forging ahead with a materialist
approach, especially in the face of overwhelming criticism. More important, not
all the “feminist” critiques have equal merit, and some of them also rely on
assumptions about innate “maternal warmth” and similar notions.

The Great Goddess

The writings of archaeologist Marja Gimbutas (1981, 1982, 1989, 1991) and
her followers have promoted female figurines from the European Paleolithic and
oO) TCEAPTIERS

Neolithic from passive reflections of ideal womanhood, created for and by men,
to sacred icons of a past, peaceful matriarchy that lost out to the conquering
patriarchal, horse-mounted steppe nomads millennia ago. Gimbutas (1981)
explicitly argues that these ancient figurines and rock art images of women have
nothing to do with sexuality or other physical experiences, but that they have
everything to do with symbolic and philosophical concepts. Gimbutas reacted to
Onians’ 1978 article by first pointing out that we don’t know whether the makers
of Paleolithic art were males or females; she then asserted that they were not
depicting sexual experience or desire, but abstract beliefs (1981). With regard to
the female figurines and the vulva depictions in parietal art, Gimbutas 982;
1989, 1991) has posited an ancient and widespread belief in a Mother Goddess.
Her popular Goddess books have sparked the imaginations of adherents to neo-
pagan religions and women’s spirituality movements. For many “ecofeminists,”
the figurines embody the past dominance of peaceful earth-worshipping societies
and promise the possibility of a return to such values.
The Goddess theory has drawn fire from many feminist archaeologists (Trin-
gham and Conkey 1998; Meskell 1995, 1998). First, what about the skinny sis-
ters, brothers, apparently sexless siblings, and animal companions of the ancient
ample Mothers? Systematic, quantitative study of Paleolithic figurines shows, first,
that they are unevenly distributed in space and time anc so are not likely to have
functioned in the same way for all Paleolithic Europeans; and second, that the’
majority of them have no indications of breasts, buttocks, or other sexual charac-
teristics that, of course, are not necessary for a figure to symbolize “fertility,” but
which analysts have identified as primarily about fertility. Of those that do appear
to be female, relatively few are fat. The characteristics Western historians and
ecofeminists have chosen to emphasize were neither typical nor particularly fre-
quent (Dobres 1992; Nelson 1990; Meskell 1995, 1998; Russell 1991; Trin-
gham and Conkey 1998). In light of these systematic, scientific results, what do
figurines say about sex and gender arrangements in ancient Europe? Certainly, the
answer is not straightforward, and the figurines may very well mean that sex was
not an important axis of differentiation among figurines and, therefore, perhaps
not among humans at all times and places. Even if some figurines do represent
ideal womanhood and a Goddess for ancient Europeans, have we really learned
anything about human women in the past? After all, recognizing the veneration
of the Virgin Mary in Mexico does not tell us anything about actual living condi-
tions for mortal Mexican women.
To her credit, Gimbutas doesn’t take male-centered interpretation for granted;
she doesn’t use ethnographic analogy from “primitive” people elsewhere in the
world to stand for ancient peoples; and she does cast a wide net. She employs a
 ENGENDERING AND DEGENDERING n ~—I

direct historical connection via European mythology, or at least a simplified ver-

sion of some southwest Asian goddess traditions. But she lumps together a diverse
array of images from many times and places, and says they all mean the same
thing. She ignores contrary evidence and temporal discontinuities, and replaces a
male-centered bias with a female-centered one. This feminine bias is itself less
than accurate, casting the feminine gender as always and perhaps only about
motherhood, nurturing, and fertility. As we shall see in chapters 8 and 9, this is
not the case, even among the world’s agriculturalists.

“Storied” Women, Men, and Animals

Alexander Marshak’s (1972) detailed microscopic examination of portable art—
carvings in bone and antler, as well as on stone plaques—led him to emphasize
diversity in Paleolithic imagery. His interpretations focus less on specific mean-
ings of the art and more on the ways it might have been used, particularly in
storytelling, record keeping, and rituals that focus on time sequencing. Many sets
of marks on figurines and in rock engravings seem to plausibly represent the
tracking of seasonal changes, migrations of food animals, menstrual cycles, the
lunar months of pregnancy, and other human and animal life-cycle events and
processes.
Due to the diversity of sexed images in the art, “traditional theories concern-
ing ‘fertility magic’ would seem to be an oversimplification, much as theories of
‘hunting magic’ were” (1972, 282). Marshack counters that sexuality can be
thought of in terms of initiation ordeals at puberty for both boys and girls; men-
strual and birth taboos; or using sympathetic magic for success in pregnancy, per-
haps involving sacrifice or prayer. Foremost, the female images in Paleolithic art
suggest to Marshack a “human recognition of sequence and process—one in
which a girl matures, develops breasts, develops pubic hairs, menstruates for the
first time, and then sequentially or periodically changes her ‘personality’ or ‘char-
acter,’ becomes accessible for mating, becomes pregnant but does not always
deliver successfully, lactates or gives milk, cares for the infant, and eventually
grows old” (1972, 282). Imagery refers to stories, and images were probably
made and used in the context of telling, recalling, and enacting stories. “Every
process recognized and used in human culture becomes a story, and every story 1s
an event which includes characters (whether spirit, god, hero, person, ‘mana,’ or
in modern terms, element particle, force or law) who change or do things in time.
Without knowing the story, we can assume that the reality of sexual maturation,
function, and interrelation, male and female, was storied.” (1972, 283).
Marshack considers a wider variety of female and male images than most
50) GHAPITERSS

authors discussed here, but within this diverse corpus he discerns a set of regularly
occurring images that focus on breasts, buttocks, pregnancy, and the vulva. The
vulva form, he argues, is not erotic, nor ts tt simply the emblem of a single Great
Goddess; rather, the vulva becomes

isolated, abstracted, and symbolic to the point where it could be recog-

nized in a simple circle with a single mark. One assumes, then, that the
image and story were so well-known they were “understood” by every
adult in the culture, that it was a traditional image with a traditional
story. ... It is not the anatomical “sexual” organ that is being symbol-
ized, but the stories, characters, and processes with which the symbol
had become associated... .
Though this image is female and “sexual,” it was neither erotic nor
merely a form of “fertility magic.” By story and usage it seems to be
related to female processes, animals, birds, cave ceremonial and ritual,
the seasons, homesite record-keeping, and the tradition of notation.
(1972, 297, 313)

These stories, then, might or might not involve fertility, intercourse, eroti-
cism, pregnancy, menstruation, the cycle of the seasons, and so forth. We may
not know the content of the stories, but the process of making, handling, color-
ing, marking, and saying words with figurines and other kinds ofimages is under-
standable. Marshack interprets patterns of regular association among images and
repeated marks as notation systems, calendars, and tallies. He then posits that
Paleolithic artists used human and animal imagery as metonyms and metaphors
for all kinds of processes: “Could it be that the periodic and regular female proc-
esses and their stories served as the basis for storied equations, explanations, and
verifications for comparable periodic processes in nature? .. . The structure of
any regular, periodic phenomenon could be used to explain or incorporate any
other.” Human processes can be used to explain nature, and animal processes can
help explain human ones. Artist /storytellers may have used animals as characters
to explain processes that are human, including human pregnancy and birth,
dreams, trance, death, and so on.
Marshack seems to accept stereotypes of women as primarily biological enti-
ties concerned with reproductive functions, and men as the primary hunters and
shamans. He refers to depictions of men (as shamans, sorcerers, or dancers) as
active; and women “in decoration and ornaments” as apparently passive onlookers
(1972, 330). But he does consider the diversity of female experience and life
cycle, and he also considers male imagery and male life cycles. For example,
 ENGENDERING AND DEGENDERING 59

“When masculine figures are shown, they are sometimes, but not always, ithyphal-
lic, that is, with penis erect. This would seem to indicate that one aspect of the
rite had an ‘erotic’ content, but what content is difficult to tell for the males are
not related to human females but to animals” (1972, 303). Where many research-
ers focused on female imagery and tried to explain it within a single interpretive
framework, Marshack counters that examining the evidence reveals extreme varia-
tion in meanings and use. He demonstrates a separate and specialized masculine
imagery and a complicated animal corpus, in addition to the female imagery com-
plex. He posits distinct, though interrelated, mythologies, and he stresses the per-
formative context of imagery and objects in ways that have currency
today—particularly in the development of theories focused on initiation, land-
scape, and social geography.

Initiation
For many decades, some researchers have suggested that caves were loci of initia-
tions, where adults imparted important information to children. John Pfeiffer’s
Creative Explosion (1982) expands this hypothesis and draws on ethnography and
cognitive evolution, as well as arguments from the images and their settings. Pfeif-
fer sees imagery as information. Information may be imparted most effectively in
certain settings, especially those that induce sensory deprivation and strong emo-
tions. Initiations in many cultures emphasize physical ordeals and restrictions on
food, water, salt, and sleep. Deep, dark caves would provide excellent venues for
initiation, and the sizes of footprints and handprints in many painted caves show
that adults and children were clearly there together. Whether sex and accurate
ages can be deduced from hand- and footprints is controversial, however. Differ-
ent researchers have sometimes drawn different conclusions about age and sex
from measuring the same prints. An extremely well-preserved footprint in the
newly discovered Chauvet cave appears to have been studied with a great deal of
care, and it may be that of an eight-year-old male. Michel-Alain Garcia (1999,
3) points out that “from what we know elsewhere the tracks of children have
more chance to come down to us, very simply because youths take untypical paths
where their traces have less chance of being obliterated by multiple passages.”
And although the initiation theory explains a possible social function for the art,
it doesn’t address meaning, nor does it explain why cave art appears and disap-
pears at particular times and why it is concentrated in certain regions.

Social Geography
If art functioned to exchange information, that information could be about more
than hunting food animals and avoiding dangerous ones. Paleolithic people might
60 CHAPTER 3

have also exchanged messages about social identities and groups to help people
form social and economic networks. Some archaeologists (such as Olga Soffer
1997, 256; Michael Jochim 1983; and Margaret Conkey in 1978, but not since
then) have suggested that Paleolithic art functioned primarily as adaptive signal-
ing of the social order. If art functions in the context of social geography, Jochim
(1983) would argue that images should be most frequent in localities and time
periods when population density increased, or when environments were deterio-
rating or otherwise posing high risks to hunter-gatherers. Such conditions would
have led to social stress and thus the need to negotiate group identities and terri-
tories. Clive Gamble (1982) once argued that depictions of women, especially
figurines, functioned in the context of actual exchanges of marriage partners. The
social geography approach, like the initiation hypothesis, provides an effective
challenge to the “art as a leisure activity” theory. Social geography is compatible
with the initiation theory and accounts for diversity of the art by attributing for-
mal difference to deliberate signaling of social difference. It requires one to “look
between the caves” and see whole landscapes (Conkey 1997) and to consider
population distribution and population structure. For example, higher densities
of portable art objects seem to occur at sites that were apparently places for social
gatherings. Other lines of evidence, however, such as the variety of different ways
people made their tools, suggest that Paleolithic social relations were fluid, not
highly structured or bounded (Conkey 1997; Dobres 1995a). Therefore, territo-
rial or “ethnic” identities are not necessarily the kinds of social differences
expressed in the art. At least one researcher has suggested the possibility of indi-
vidual self-portraits in Paleolithic art (McDermott 1996),

Sacred Landscapes
For people of many cultures, caves are special places in the landscape with spiri-
tual meanings. Cultures often, if not always, attribute feminine gender to caves.
Their dark, enclosed spaces, often associated with water, provide reasonably “nat-
ural” analogs for vaginal openings and wombs. Decorating the walls of a cave can
enhance such symbolic meanings. Walking through a decorated cave can be like
walking through a story or a myth, perhaps reenacting Creation itself. Compatible
with Leroi-Gourhan’s mythograms and with the initiation ‘and social geography
theories, the notion that decorated caves served as key places in sacred landscapes
provides some interpretation of content and placement as well as imagery. We
shall return to this topic in chapter 8.

Shamans of Prebistory
David Lewis-Williams’ neuropsychological model for rock art interpretation pos-
its (a) that the brains of all anatomically modern human beings are wired to pro-
 ENGENDERING AND DEGENDERING 61

duce certain visual and auditory hallucinations in altered states of consciousness

and (b) that “shamanism” is a useful cross-cultural category of religious prac-
tice—widespread, if mot universal, among hunter—gatherers—in _which
practitioners contact a spirit world by means of altered states of consciousness
(Lewis- Williams and Dowson 1988). In the early phases of trance, these visual
hallucinations take the form of repeated geometric shapes, such as grids, dots,
concentric circles, or nested curves or zigzags. These “entoptic” (produced within
the eye) images may be accompanied by sounds and by sensations of falling, fly-
ing, floating, sinking, and feeling the elongation of one’s hands and limbs.
Depending on expectations shaped by culture, in the next phase of trance one
sees visions of animals, fantastic creatures, and spirit helpers. In cultures with a
tradition of shamanism, rock paintings, carvings, and finger marks may therefore
have been done to record or express trance experiences; or to refer to stories,
rituals, or beliefs that have their origins in such experiences. Content of rock art
may be interpreted as visions seen in altered states of consciousness or as meta-
phors that refer to the trance experience and contact with spiritual beings. Lewis-
Williams argues that shamanism best explains most rock art in southern Africa,
where trance-dance and spirit possession are ethnographically documented in San
(Bushman) cultures, including those presumed to have been descendents of the
rock artists and their linguistic relatives (Lewis-Williams 1981; Lewis-Williams
and Dowson 1988, 2000). Rock art elsewhere in the world may also be explained
as shamanistic on the basis of analogy if it fulfills certain formal and contextual
criteria, such as appearance of geometric figures resembling entoptic forms,
human—animal combinations, and placement in localities consistent with vision
quests. Lewis-Williams and Jean Clottes have made a case for such an analogy in
the Paleolithic rock art of Europe (Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998). Placement
of art in dark caves is consistent with sensory deprivation and with ritual practice.
Many of the geometric “signs” resemble entoptic tmages. Many animal and com-
bined animal—human images are consistent with trance metaphors—death, swim-
ming, flying, bleeding. This theory explains partial figures, which may be
interpreted as disappearing into the rock (and thence into a spirit world behind
the rock) or as emerging from it. Hand stencils may be interpreted as communica-
tion with, supplication of, or integration with this spirit world.
The shamanism model doesn’t explicitly address gender. Simply classifying a
religion as shamanistic does not predict the gender of the practitioner and may
indeed predict that complicated gender arrangements should be expected (Holli-
mon 2001; Price in press; Saladin d’Anglure 1992). In some ethnographic cul-
tures with religious specialists we can classify as shamans, only males can take on
this role, while in others both males and females can be shamans. In a few cul-
62 GOAP TERS.

tures, most shamans are female, and in most, shamans are individuals who are
expected to combine, confound, or transcend sex and gender categories. The sha-
manism model, more properly called the neuropsychological model, does predict
that images ofsexual intercourse and sexual organs may be deployed as metaphors
for trance and transformation. Like the eroticism model, the neuropsychological
model derives its imagery from bodily experience, but as in the mythogram model,
images may also serve as metaphors or other references to abstract concepts. We
shall return to shamans in later chapters.

A Healthy Skepticism
Currently, French researchers seem to express skepticism at best about all of the
above explanations, and many are outright against the “shamanism model.” At
least in Europe, investigators have backed away from the naive projection of pres-
ent-day gender stereotypes into the past, but they also seem to have retreated
from gendered interpretations altogether. Michel Lorblanchet, for example, seems
most interested in meticulous documentation; accurate and precise dating; associ-
ations with other aspects of archaeological context; and appropriate, ethical con-
servation and site management. Prior to his foray into the shamanic world with
Lewis- Williams (as outlined earlier), former director of cultural resources for
France’s Midi-Pyrenees region Jean Clottes said that interpretation should begin
with identifying the images as to animal species, sex, age, season, and behavior
(Clottes 1995), but he made no predictions about where such identifications
might lead.
Research on Paleolithic art was gendered from the beginning and now must
be “degendered,” that is, purged of prior assumptions about gender (see Moore
1991). For one thing, the discovery of earlier rock art in Australia, and perhaps
that of Africa, has destabilized Eurocentrism and speculation about the “origins”
of art in the European Upper Paleolithic. Franco-Cantabrian paintings were the
first Pleistocene-era rock art to be “discovered,” but we now know it wasn’t the
earliest and that it can’t represent the “origins” of art. Therefore, the notion that
Paleolithic art in Europe encodes some fundamental, original, essential, or primi-
tive notions about sex and gender, from eroticism to a primordial Great Goddess,
must seem far less compelling even to the most fervent seeker of human universals
and archetypes.
Most rock art researchers today would agree with Margaret Conkey that no
one interpretation is “right” or “true.” In many cases, several explanations can
coexist happily, and sometimes even none seem adequate. The problem may be
in our pursuit of “meaning,” as Conkey suggests. Many kinds of meaning exist.
 ENGENDERING AND DEGENDERING — 63

Meaning isn’t stable or unchanging. Some kinds of meaning may remain consis-
tent for long periods of time; some kinds of meaning change. There can be no
single relationship between specific symbols and their interpretation, and we can’t
“reveal” meaning by simply collecting more information about context (Conkey
1997, 362). Most important, we must avoid “losing ourselves in mythical ideals”
(Conkey 1997, 363). The myths in the rock art literature so far are mainly ours,
not those of prehistoric people.
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Regendering Fertility Shrines in the West 4

HE HISTORY OF ROCK ART research in the far western United States par-
allels that of western Europe in many ways. Many of the approaches to
studying American rock art derive from the very European studies out-
lined in the previous chapter. Here, however, we have recourse to some appro-
priate ethnographic data. We can therefore employ informed methods to turn
around a sexist reading of rock art based on Western-biased suppositions, turning
instead toward readings that are more in keeping with Native American belief
systems. While not negating the “fertility” theme entirely, I hope to develop a
more nuanced understanding of the concept.

Surveying the Literature

While working with rock art as one line of evidence for variations in gender
ideology in the western Pueblo culture area of the U.S. Southwest (Hays-Gilpin
2000c), I wanted to review what other researchers were doing with rock art that
may relate to gender roles, including reproduction and fertility. Has study of rock
art in the western United States provided insights into the gender ideologies of
Native Americans, or do Euro-American stereotypes prevail? What meanings
does the imagery have for the people who visit and study rock art sites today?
Is it possible to learn anything about what it meant or—just as important and
difficult—what it didn’t mean to the people who made it?
At the 1980 American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA) conference,
Clement Meighan, one of the rare unrversity professors of archaeology to embrace
rock art research, reflected on recent history of this relatively young field of study.
He concluded, “We tend to focus our attention on areas of interpretation that
are important to our own culture, and to matters that may be uppermost in the
minds of the interpreters. It 1s not an accident that the burst of study dealing
with astronomical significance of rock art sites 1s published in the era when our
own culture is deeply involved with the exploration of outer space.” He also com-

6S
66 CHAPTER 4

mented that our national fascination with hallucinogenic drugs inspires the
notion that “prehistoric man” might have used drugs and left a record of this
experience in rock art (Meighan 1932) 15 Meighan was right, and I think he was,
the role of gender in rock art interpretation should be just as perplexing and
problematic as it is in “real life” today; and the role of sex in rock art interpreta-
tion might have something to do with America’s culturally ingrained obsession
with sex: from the sexual repressions of the Victorian era and 1950s, to the sexual
“revolutions” of the 1920s and 1960s to the present. I hope to demonstrate this
position with a feminist critique of some of the existing rock art literature about
the western United States and northern Mexico.
To discover something about how “rock art enthusiasts” interpret rock art in
terms of gender, I reviewed 481 articles in two series of edited conference paper
volumes dated before 1998. The American Rock Art Research Association has
published American Indian Rock Art since 1975, and the San Diego Museum of Man
has published Rock Art Papers since 1983. Many of the authors are avocational
researchers who pursue careers such as medicine, psychology, engineering, studio
art, photography, and teaching. Some teach art history or related subjects at the
college level. About half the authors are professional archaeologists, including
museum curators, agency or private-sector archaeologists, and college professors.
They are mainly middle-class Euro-Americans, and some come from Europe;
only one, as far as I know, is a member of an Indian tribe (and he is a junior -
author). Men wrote 60 percent of the articles; women wrote 24 percent; and the
rest were coauthored by men and women.!
The concerns of the authors are, overwhelmingly, centered on describing,
recording, and conserving rock art before it succumbs to vandals, developers, and
weather. Most of the authors limited their interpretation of images to naming:
for example, “This figure represents a pregnant woman” or “This figure is male.”
They classified images and sites by style and according to other kinds of evidence
for temporal and cultural affiliation; in addition, they made formal comparisons
between sites, periods, and regional styles. Those who attempted to define the
possible meanings that the rock art might have had to its makers favored archae-
oastronomy, shamanism, and hunting magic; but fertility and puberty rites
appeared almost every year in a small number of articles in the two series. Articles
authored by women were slightly more likely to discuss gender than those by
men; mixed teams seemed to avoid the topic altogether. In contrast, articles by
men were slightly more likely than those by women or mixed teams to mention
archaeoastronomy.
Of the 481 articles, about 60 mentioned sex or gender in some way:
 REGENDERING FERTILITY SHRINES 67

= sites with sexed figures (male, female, or both; only Hans Bertsch [1983]
mentioned a possible “hermaphrodite” );
* sites with carved or painted “vulvaforms”;
® sites with natural geological “vulvaforms,” which have been artificially
enhanced, or which are associated with grinding slicks, other kinds of rock
art, or both;
* sites with abstract rock markings that are ethnographically attested to have
been associated with puberty ceremonies or personal fertility rituals.

I especially wanted to know what criteria rock art researchers used to choose
an appropriate line of interpretation for such sites. I also wanted to know what
motivated researchers to interpret rock art sites with one framework or another,
including the direct historical approach; the appeal to universals or to the collec-
tive unconscious; cross-cultural comparison; and the use of specific contexts and
cosmologies, as provided by an in-depth study of particular Native American
groups who could claim cultural affiliation to the sites in question.

The Direct Historical Approach: Comparison and

Extrapolation
In the late 1800s through the 1930s, ethnographers noted the Indian use of “fer-
tility shrines” in many western states—places where women or couples went to
perform personal rituals to aid conception, pregnancy, safe births, or a combina-
tion of these. These sites sometimes included natural or modified rock features
resembling genitalia, as well as pecked cupules, petroglyphs, and rock paintings.
Archaeologists rarely showed interest. With a few exceptions (Davis 1961;
Heizer and Baumhoff 1962), most professional archaeologists, until recently,
ignored rock art and other evidence for ritual activities. The “new archaeologists”
of the 1960s and 1970s considered art and ritual to be epiphenomenal to larger
concerns of environmental adaptation and, thus, too historically specific to indi-
vidual cultures to contribute to larger understanding of social process (see Whit-
ley and Loendorf 1994 for further discussion).
Many researchers have interpreted pit-and-groove petroglyphs as fertility
shrines used by women or couples, based on ethnographic Pomo records of
cupule-and-groove “baby rocks” in northern California. In the Southwest, several
authors interpret rocks with hollows and grooves in terms of Mathilda Coxe Ste-
venson’s references to a Zuni fertility shrine in New Mexico (1887; 1904,
294-95; see also Parsons 1991, 31). In this case, interpreting pit-and-groove
rock art sites as fertility shrines is a ‘direct historical approach” only when
68 CHAPTER 4

applied in the immediate vicinity of documented use by native peoples. It assumes

that gender systems are closely linked to reproductive roles, which is not always
true. It assumes that the symbols employed in ritual remain relatively stable over
time; again, sometimes this is true, sometimes not, so chronological control
should be emphasized if using this method. Outside the territories of groups
known to have produced rock art in “fertility shrines,” applications of these inter-
pretations are speculative; usually they simply assume that a particular practice
was more widespread than can actually be demonstrated, a dangerous presump-
tion. Yet after careful study of ethnographies coupled with detailed site recording
and comparison, consensus of several authors (Hedges 1983a, 1983b; Parkman
1997; Stoney 1993) is that the further one gets from ethnographically docu-
mented Pomo sites, the more tenuous any connection becomes between pit-and-
groove rock art and fertility ritual.

Gender Universals or European Stereotypes?

In the late 1970s, the gendered rock art literature seems to take a turn away from
a consideration of women in their ethnographic settings and toward concern with
masculine ritual and a cosmological scale. In fact, what we see is a continuation
of European traditions of rock art interpretation long steeped in gender stereo-
types, as described by Margarita Diaz-Andreu in her critique of gendered studies
of Levantine rock art (1998). European traditions usually conflate sex and gen-
der; assume clear-cut and static gender duality; and cast men and masculine super-
naturals in active roles, and women and feminine deities in passive, secondary, or
supportive roles. Diaz-Andreu points out that many authors interpreted a depic-
tion of a feminine figure using a digging stick as “a ritual scene associated to
fertility” rather than an as economic activity (1998, 43). European traditions also
attempt to “naturalize” these relationships and claim they are universal. They are
in fact neither universal nor natural.
In the following examples of research from the western United States,
arranged more or less chronologically, we see the projection of procreative con-
cerns on to ancient images of females. Beyond that is the notion that the rock art
has nothing to do with women at all, with unsupported statements that rock art
has everything to do with the activities of male shamans and a worldview that
stresses masculine activity and feminine passivity. Direct comparisons of North
American rock art with gendered interpretations of European rock art also
appear. Many interpretations seem to have a foundation in European primitiv-
ism—the notion that Native Americans (as well as Africans and Australians) are
present-day holdovers of ancient hunter—gatherers and the earliest village farmers,
 REGENDERING FERTILITY SHRINES = 69

all of whom lived in a highly desirable state of closeness to Nature—pure, child-

like, irrational, untainted by the evils of civilization.

FERTILE GENITALS Ina 1973 book on rock art in the Great Lakes, Vastokas
and Vastokas discuss a female image (figure 4.1) at the Peterborough Petroglyphs
in Ontario. She is arranged around a natural crack in the rock that has become a
uterus and vulva. They argue not that this figure depicts a woman, but that it
“might be interpreted as materializations of the spirits of nature, and the site itself
as a symbolic uterus and a means of access for the shaman to the sexual energy
of nature upon which he can draw from for the benefit of mankind” (1973, 89).
This figure and its interpretation are referenced often in subsequent papers by
ARARA members, first by Ken Hedges in an article entitled “Southern California
Rock Art as Shamanic Art” (Hedges 1976). Suggesting that “the ultimate
responsibility of the shaman is fertility in its most general sense,” Hedges inter-
prets other female sexed figures and vulvaforms in rock art in shamanic terms. He

Fig. 4.1 Female figure, Peterborough, Ontario. After Vastokas and Vastokas (1973); drawing by
Sylvia Kaliss, from McGowan (1982, 18), courtesy of C. McGowan.
70 CHAPTER 4

argues that for similar figures in the Coso range of California and the Petrified
Forest of Arizona (figure 4.2), “a similar meaning may be inferred from the obvi-
ous emphasis on the vulva.”
The geology of southern California sometimes presents rock formations that
naturally resemble female genitalia. In some instances, prehistoric people
enhanced this resemblance by pecking and grinding the rock into a more realistic
shape and by adding radiating lines. Several researchers note that the enhanced
rocks often face east and catch the rays of the rising sun. Ken Hedges presented
a paper describing such a site at the first ARARA conference in 1975. Located
in the Canebrake district in southern California, it has a rock that is naturally
shaped like a vulva, a pitted bouldet, and a panel of red paintings. In 1933, an
old Kumeyaay shaman had described two fertility rocks in this district. Young
women who could not conceive would be taken to the rock, but he did not reveal
if a specific ceremony was performed. Hedges notes that pitted boulders or
cupules were used by the Pomo of northern California to help women concetve,
and they were also used by the Luisefio of southern California in boys’ puberty
rites. The Canebrake paintings are different in style from those produced by Lui-
sefio girls in their puberty rites but “could be functionally similar.” Hedges con-
cludes that “the juxtaposition of the natural ‘fertility rock,’ ethnographically
documented, with the pitted boulder and the pictographs may indicate that this
was a site of particular importance in matters of human fertility” (1976).
At the 1977 ARARA conference, Charlotte McGowan presented a survey
entitled “Female Fertility and Rock Art” (McGowan 1978; see also McGowan
1982). Later authors repeatedly cite this article and its theme. McGowan begins
with a statement that ‘Female fertility, both that of animals and humans, has

00
Fig. 4.2
(1976).
BX.go
Female images from a variety of western sites. Drawing by Ken Hedges, from Hedges
 REGENDERING FERTILITY SHRINES 71

always concerned man” (1978, 26). She identifies two types of rock art that deal
with fertility: depictions of females and abstract forms analogous to Leroi-Gour-
han’s (1968) wide and narrow signs in European Paleolithic cave art. In the
Americas, she argues, we have as data actual depictions of females, depictions of
genitalia, pit-and-groove petroglyphs, and ethnographic reports of the ritual use
of particular places. She focuses on a particular site in southern California that
has natural but enhanced vulva-shaped rocks (figure 4.3), which she names
“yonis” from the Sanskrit.
The use of Sanskrit is worth noticing; it not only labels these forms as univer-
sal and ancient, but it also lends them an exotic flavor that the recruitment of a
Latin or Greek term could not provide. The site also has pit-and-groove petro-
glyphs resembling those used by the Pomo of northern California in fertility ritu-
als, grinding slicks, and potsherds identified as Kumeyaay. Female fertility must
have been important to the Kumeyaay people, McGowan concludes, because they

Fig. 4.3 Drawing of a contemporary woman gazing at a ‘Yoni’ rock, a natural rock formation
that may have been culturally enhanced. Jamul, California. This drawing appears as the cover art
for Charlotte McGowan’s 1982 monograph entitled Ceremonial Fertility Sites in Southern
California. Drawing by Sylvia Kaliss, from McGowan (1982, 8), courtesy of C. McGowan.
72 GHAPTER 4

held puberty rites for girls. This site, then, must have been an important ceremo-
nial site to the Kumeyaay people. She then reiterates how fertility has been impor-
tant to all humans since the Upper Paleolithic up to “our own part of Southern
California.”
This theme appears frequently in this series of papers: the California land-
scape has a meaning to the writer and for her readers, which is strengthened—or
created—through reference to human universals, unchanging and unquestioned
feminine essentials, and great time-depths. Local Indians, evoked through an
uncritical reading of older ethnographies and portrayed as recently disappeared,
apparently shared the same interests as people everywhere. Through the process
of discovering the expression of these common interests in the landscape, immu-
grant white, middle-class rock art researchers find a personal, perhaps spiritual,
connection to their surroundings.
Layne Miller's 1982 conference paper discusses a “possible copulation scene”
(figure 4.4) on Rochester Creek in central Utah that could give the entire rock
art site “fertility implications.” He writes:

The life of the prehistoric Indian was tenuous at best and nothing
could have been more important, more in the forefront of their
thoughts, than being able to have children in order to strengthen the
family unit. The wants and needs of these people were not unlike our
own today. They probably wanted to be comfortable, loved their fami-
lies, and they did their best to live a life that was enjoyable and one
that had great meaning. Rochester Creek could be an example of such
striving. (Miller 1982)

Eve Ewing identifies a vulva symbol inside a cave in Baja California (Ewing
1985). Quoting Hedges’ earlier argument that shamans were responsible for fer-
tility, she argues that this site—with a vulva symbol inside and depictions of
atlatls (masculine weapons) at its mouth—fits this interpretation; thus, it “has
broader implications than just fertility.”
Like McGowan, Delcie Vuncannon (1985) cites Leroi-Gourhan’s dual-
gendered Paleolithic schema, and the discovery of vulvaforms in European caves.
Vulvas are also widespread in North America, she notes, and “also must have had
truly significant meaning.” The Chalfant site in southern California has over one
hundred vulvaforms (figure 4.5), associated with “male” signs in the form of
“barbs.” “That the juxtaposition of the two abstract figures suggests fertility can-
not be denied.”
 REGENDERING FERTILITY SHRINES 73

Fig. 4.4 Copulating figures, Rochester Creek, central Utah. Drawing by Patricia McCreery.

il)
Min”

c
Fig. 4.5 Vulvaforms at the Chalfant Site, California. From Vuncannon (1985, 125); reprint
courtesy of Delcie Vuncannon.
74 CHAPTER 4

Winston “Bud” Hampton also invokes European cave art in his analysis of a
female figure he calls the “Sea Goddess,” at Piedras Pintas in Baja California (fig-
ure 4.6).
“Dripping with ecstatic energy, the interpretative Mother Sea Goddess domi-
nates the central portion of the Piedras Pintas petroglyph ridge” (Hampton
1994). He describes her vulva symbol as “classical” and presents an illustration
of thirty-thousand-year-old Aurignacian vulvaforms as proof. “All over the world,
we see the vulva symbol used to symbolize, in some fashion, regenerative power
and fertility.” He cites Marija Gimbutas’ Goddess writings (1989): “In this con-
text, I interpret this female anthropomorph to be an example of early human-
kind’s Mother Goddess herself. As it is located near the sea and surrounded by a
host of marine life symbols, I call this figure the Piedras Pintas Sea Goddess.”
Hampton clearly interprets this figure as the same Mother Goddess described by
Gimbutas for all of Europe and, indeed, for all the world. Almost as an after-
thought, Hampton notes a male figure about forty feet away, endowed with “clear
penis and testicles.” He may be a god or the goddess’s consort, “but this figure
does not visually exude the strong, ecstatic energy of the female.”

Fig. 4.6 ‘Sea Goddess” petroglyph, Baja California. Photo by O. W. Hampton.

 REGENDERING FERTILITY SHRINES’ °75

Grace Burkholder's description of the female figures at the Mount Shader site
in Nye County, Nevada, concludes with a brief review of previous literature on
rock art and fertility in neighboring California. Although without ethnographic
evidence “such an interpretation will probably remain an untested hypothesis,”
this fertility hypothesis remains the favored one (indeed the only one). Why? Is
it because Native Americans universally associate female figures with fertility?
Rather, it is because Euro-Americans do. Instead of hiding her own subjective
response behind citations of Carl Jung, for example, Burkholder makes hers
explicit. She writes, “However, one Earth Mother continues to reach out to the
world around her, in silent testimony, reminding even those who view her hun-
dreds of years later of the gift of life and the generative bounty of the earth”
(Burkholder 1992, 70).

SUN FATHER AND EARTH MOTHER A theme that gains ground over time
in the ARARA and San Diego series relates vulvaforms and female figures in rock
art to solar phenomena interpreted as the impregnation of the Earth Mother by
a masculine solar deity. In a series of articles about Baja California sites, Eve
Ewing evokes universal gender dualities (Ewing 1986, 1990, 1992, 1993; Ewing
and Robin 1987; Robin and Ewing 1989, 1993). To argue that a particular set
of paintings at Pintadita represents creation and emergence, she appeals not only
to the Zuni Hero Twins story but to Mircea Eliade’s (1964) linking of shaman-
ism and sex, analogies to Australian Dreamtime as creation of sacred landscapes,
a universal association of caves with wombs, and Sjoo and Mor's (Sjoo 1975;
Sjoo and Mor 1987) argument that the process of birth is everywhere a prototype
for spiritual rebirth: “It is in the womb that the greatest mystery and miracle of
transformation perceived by early man occurred. ... The cosmology of emergence
mythologies is grounded in female energies” (Ewing 1986, 108); and “for primal
people, death and rebirth are instantaneous and interconnected” (Ewing 1986,
118). The site, Ewing argues, represents the male shaman’s efforts to gain female
spiritual power to effect their own rebirth; she concludes that “the artists were
immersed in the universal principles of a very ancient world view.” At these sites,
she finds interactions of shadows, light shafts, and rock art in caves. In one, a
shadow changes from phallic-shaped to breast-shaped as it moves along the cave
floor (figure 4.7). Ewing concludes that these sites were therefore “utilized by the
shaman artist in his quest for useful power” (1990, 31), Placing the author and
reader in the picture as well, she adds, “early man was motivated by the great
mystery of life, and now has left us one of our own.”
In contrast, several authors use oral traditions of southern California tribes,
76 CHAPTER 4

Fig. 4.7 On the summer solstice, this phallus-shaped beam of sunlight suddenly penetrates a
shadowy alcove and moves across the petroglyphs. Cueva Halcén, Baja California. Courtesy of
Eve Ewing.

instead of human universals, to relate sun (or actual sunlight passing over rock
art figures) and vulva symbols to “intersecting masculine and feminine dimensions
representing the beginning of time, the point of conception” (Gough 1987). Nine
“yoni” rocks near Perris Reservoir, in Luisefio territory, appear to have been
enhanced (Rafter 1990). Some have grinding slicks nearby. One of the nine has
pecked parallel lines that are, according to Rafter, “probably aligned with the
equinox sunrise” because the Luisefio begin their year in the spring. Their creation
myth describes a male being and a female being, brother and sister to each other,
and mother and father to us all. “The eastward orientation of the yonis would
assure a most direct connection with the equinox sunrise, a union with the sun or
sky, promoting fertility for the world after a sparse and infertile winter.”
Rafter (1987, 1995S) interprets womb, vulva, and sun symbols at several sites
in the Counsel Rocks of southern California in terms of the Chemehuevi story
about the Lone Woman of the Cave, who is impregnated by the sun and gives
birth to twins. Astronomical phenomena observed from the sites include the sun’s
rays entering a cave called Womb Rock on the spring equinox sunrise. A nearby
rock shelter full of vulva figures and cupules may represent Lone Woman’s cave
home. A site in Joshua Tree National Park, Rafter argues, embodies the same
story: the equinox sun’s rays fall on a red painting of a woman in a niche. At
 REGENDERING FERTILITY SHRINES 77

noon on that day, a sun dagger plunges into a bedrock mortar above her. Figures
in a nearby niche “may be the Twin Sons of the Sun” (1995, 32). The twin stars
Castor and Pollux rise nine months after the spring equinox.
The Earth Mother impregnated by sun and water is also found in Southwest
rock art. Williamson and Young (1979) interpret a site in Hovenweep National
Monument, Utah, in terms of the impregnation of the Earth Mother by sun and
water, resulting in the birth of the Puebloan Hero Twins. The Zuni Hero Twins
were conceived and born at Hantlipinkya, a water-worn grotto where the rays of
the summer solstice sun shine on a rayed spiral petroglyph (Hays-Gilpin 2000a,
175-79). Hantlipinkya lies within a few miles of the Zuni villages and is still
visited by Zuni religious practitioners (see also Young 1988, 177),
Hans Bertsch (1983) describes the Cave of Life in the Petrified Forest (figure
4.8), where the winter solstice sun “penetrates” crevices that form the cave wall,
which is embellished with “one of the most graphic representations of sexual
activity I have ever seen in rock art.” In addition to the copulation scene, Bertsch
identifies in the same panel “paired flaps” below a male figure’s penis that “may
represent female labia,” so we see here “a hermaphroditic symbolic union of the
male and female elements in one individual” (1983, 26). Hermaphroditic (inter-
SeX ) figures do appear in the oral traditions of the Zuni, other Pueblo peoples,

Fig. 4.8 Cave of Life, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. Photo by Kelley Hays-Gilpin.
78 CHAPTER 4

and the Navajo, but possible images of them are rarely noted and never examined
in depth. The figure in question (see figure 2.13c, p. 29) looks to me like it has
a penis with testicles, not labia, but Bertsch’s consideration of the possibility of
intersex figures nonetheless was ahead of its time.

THE HEIROS GAMOS_ The most entertaining series of articles that interprets sex-
ual imagery in terms of human universals is German psychoanalyst Heinz Hun-
ger’s “Ritual Coition as Sacred Marriage,” followed by “Ritual Coition with
Animals,” and “Ritual Coition with Inanimate Objects” (Hunger 1983, 1986,
1993). In all cases, the author argues that the sex acts depicted in Southwest rock
art are not procreative but show sex enacted for ritual purposes. The sex acts
shown really took place, he argues; they are not merely illustrations of myths or
stories. In discussing a Chaco Canyon example in which one figure wears a horned
headdress, Hunger asserts that this is

a public performance of the sex act between a man, ritually masked as

an animal, and with a girl, for the common welfare and well-being of
the community. What the shaman is enacting here by copulating pub-
licly with his wife or a chosen girl, sometimes called or even being a
virgin, was done in compliance with the religious requirements of a
time-honored ritual and had nothing to do with love and/or the pro-
creation of descendants, so much as to ritual coition with an animal.
(1986, 118)

Hunger invokes Frazer and Jung, and includes examples from several parts of the
world. He concludes his third article with: “Ritual coition is not a ‘fertility rite’
in the sense of a biological means of effecting pregnancy. It is, rather, a form of
religious expression designed to establish contact between primitive man and the
metaphysical focus of his existence” (1993, 79).
One of Hunger’s main goals is to establish that such figures are not pornogra-
phy; they are not to be scorned, for “they were and still are, with all their strange-
ness, part and parcel of our forefathers’ religion. They deserve to be respected
with due reverence” (1993, 79). With this I can heartily agree. Unfortunately,
Hunger ignores relevant ethnography and thus fails to remove sexism from inter-
pretation by presenting these figures as rituals perpetrated by male shamans on
passive girls, women, animals, and inanimate objects that represented feminine
spiritual beings. Hunger made a similar argument about Australian rock art
(Hunger 1988, cited in Bullen 1991, 5S). Hunger described Pilbara images as
depictions of ritual promiscuity: Bullen writes, “the images are described in terms
 REGENDERING FERTILITY SHRINES 79

of women exposing themselves, while men excitedly await their turn. Hunger’s
interpretation emphasizes the power of men over women, and their capacity to
break taboos without suffering predicted consequences.”

Dangerous Liasions
In contrast to Western sexist views, actual Native American cosmologies are more
likely to place masculine and feminine imagery in complementary roles; to view
them as interpenetrating and always changing; and to see both masculine and
feminine personages as active, as nurturing, and as potentially violent or danger-
ous (for documentation and detailed examples, see especially Jacobs, Thomas,
and Lang 1997; McCafferty and McCafferty 1999; Roscoe 1991, 1998; Schlegel
1977). Hierarchy and conflict may still hide in systems of gender complementar-
ity (cf. McCafferty and McCafferty 1999), but the active /passive attribution is
rarely emphasized in the (native) Americas in the way it is in European and Euro-
American gender systems.
In summary, what IJfind dangerously lacking in these Eurocentric interpreta-
tions are

* any consideration of the diversity of human thought and experience, which

most certainly includes nondualistic, nonhierarchical gender systems, espe-
cially in the American west;
= the possibility that women made and used at least some rock art;
® critique of the active /passive stereotype, which is European and not Native
American;
* uncritical reliance on the theories of Jung and Eliade (see Kehoe 1996,
2000); and
« the naive extension of oral traditions from one distinct culture area to oth-
ers with no supporting evidence for historical continuity.

Back to Ethnography
Happily, several recent (ca. 1990s) studies transcend these difficulties and still
manage to use gender systems as an interpretive framework. They have in com-
mon a careful use of ethnography, sometimes including oral traditions. For exam-
ple, McCreery and McCreery (1986) identify a figure with probable female
genitals as the Hopt “Mother of Game Animals.” They do not succumb to the
nurturing charms of the Mother Earth archetype but investigate Hopi oral tradi-
tions that assign this figure not only the attribute of fertility but also danger and
violence (see also Hays-Gilpin 2000a, 183-84).
80 CHAPTER 4

Oddly enough, the only rock art that ethnographically informed authors
strongly associated with the activities of women and with women’s concerns for
puberty and pregnancy does not depict women or even human figures. Yet there
are well-documented cases of Indian women’s making and using rock art for their
own purposes—Pomo “baby rocks,” Luisefio girls’ puberty paintings of rattle-
snakes, and several other ethnographically attested puberty and fertility rites and
sites.
The Pomo studies illustrate an admirable interpretive trajectory from the
direct historical approach (early examples were perhaps infused with a degree of
unwarranted extrapolation) to a critical evaluation with systematic recording and
comparison, to a concern with specific ethnographic cultural landscapes. Early
on, a number of articles in the ARARA series reference the same ethnographic
descriptions of Pomo “baby rock” rituals whenever pit-and-groove marks—or
even just pits, called “cupules”—are found in California. For example, Lee and
McCarthy (1979) report on a site on the Stanislaus River, with pit-and-groove
marks and “horseshoe shaped” petroglyphs. They cite ethnographers Barrett
(1952) and Loeb (1926): “Among the Pomo these rocks were known as ‘baby
rocks’ and were used to cure sterility.” Although pit-and-groove rocks were used
by other tribes for weather control, the authors argue that the presence of vulva-
forms and Davis's (1961) citation of southern California tribes’ use of vulvaforms
as fertility symbols support their view that this site had fertility associations, even
if fertility refers to flora and fauna in general, and not just humans. They conclude
that the petroglyphs represent “intangible remains of the rituals and beliefs of the’
people who lived along the banks of the river” and are a priceless, nonrenewable
heritage (Lee and McCarthy 1979, 139).
In 1983, Ken Hedges published two articles, one in each conference series, to
evaluate the Pomo analogy. Seven specific sites were described by ethnographers
earlier in this century. Hedges relocated three and undertook detailed recording
and comparative analysis (figure 4.9). He reported a distinctive Pomo style with
grooves and abraded ovals. These figures were carved to obtain rock powder,
which women desiring pregnancy would apply to their bodies in specific patterns.
Cupules are not necessary to this function; they occur on some documented baby
rocks but not on others. Hedges, then, applied systematic archaeological and eth-
nographic comparison to develop criteria for applying the baby rock analogy. He
concludes that few if any cupule sites should be interpreted as fertility shrines
and that pit-and-groove sites should be evaluated by proximity to known Pomo
territory and specific resemblance to known and documented baby rocks.
Ritter and Parkman (1992) also express skepticism about associating cupules
and fertility shrines, arguing that most cupules near Lake Oroville in northern
 REGENDERING FERTILITY SHRINES 81

Fig. 4.9 Pomo cup and groove rock art, Bachelor Valley, California. Drawing by Ken Hedges
(1983b); computer enhanced photo by Robert Mark (scale in centimeters). Courtesy of Ken
Hedges and Robert Mark.
82 CHAPTER 4

California occur in contexts suggesting entopic forms possibly seen by shamans

in trances; a vulvalike form associated with cupules “may connect with human
fertility.” The Maidu ethnographic record for this area does not mention using
petroglyphs for “fertility magic,” but barren women apparently did visit a large,
naturally vulva-shaped rock in order to conceive. This rock has cupules, grooves,
and incised lines that look like the Pomo “fertility” rocks. The Pomo were just
across the valley, and obsidian from that area indicates trade. The authors there-
fore suggest a shared fertility magic complex, but they also note that other Cali-
fornia tribes used cupules in weather control, healing, and rituals related to food
harvesting. Likewise, Stoney (1993) argues that while cupules have been interpre-
ted as baby rocks in northern California—where they are also argued to pertain to
world-renewal ceremonies of early Hokan speakers—they were used as boundary
markers in southern California and may have been produced in puberty /initiation
ceremonies by Lutseno boys. In southern Arizona, far from Pomo territory,
cupules seem most often to inspire interpretation as work sites for sharpening
pestles. Therefore, no universal interpretation of similar figures can be supported,
and only the Pomo are certain to have used cupules as “baby rocks.” What did
this activity mean to the Pomo, and is it possible to know?
No mention of the cultural context of fertility rites within Pomo culture
appeared, however, until Parkman’s 1997 article entitled “Pomo Concepts of
Power, Spirit, and Space.” Parkman reviews available ethnography about Pomo
interactions with their natural and social environments, then presents a “socio-
geographical model for interpreting their rock art.” Pomo cosmology is based on
“concentric dualism.” Land inside the village is under human control, a source of
community power and solidarity, and mainly feminine, except for the men’s house
at the village’s center. The land outside the village is outside human control, wild,
and the source of personal ritual power for men and women. Baby rocks are
located outside villages, where individuals or couples went privately to seek con-
tact with the spirits of future children who dwelt in certain rocks. All power that
could be obtained by individuals came from the wilderness/outside space. Certain
trees, springs, gopher mounds, snakes, and mud, in addition to rocks, could also
cause pregnancy, and a “female effigy made of clay, called Earth Woman, was
given to sterile women to ensure conception. Apparently the powers affecting
fertility resided beneath the surface of Mother Earth” (Parkman 1997, 25). Park-
man speculates that women performing rituals at baby rocks may have entered
altered states of consciousness through the repetitive process of carving petro-
glyphs to produce the rock powder necessary for body marking. Then they could
enter the rock and negotiate with the spirits of unborn children. Painting a quar-
tered circle on the breast of such a woman has been documented; this practice
 REGENDERING FERTILITY SHRINES 83

might have symbolized the resolution of cosmic imbalances. According to Park-

man, rock art for the Pomo is a form of “spiritual ecology.”
By comparing ethnographies of rock art and beliefs about supernatural power
throughout the west, Whitley (2000) has recently clarified the context of Pomo
fertility rocks within two larger California traditions of pit-and-groove style rock
art. In northwestern California, pit-and-groove marks were often created for
weather control (see Heizer 1953). Cutting and grinding rock released supernatu-
ral power to stop or start rain or snow. If pit marks, or cupules, are oriented to
catch rainwater, this makes sense—rainwater as kind of cosmic semen enters the
rock where the earth is exposed. In the rest of California, including Pomo terri-
tory, pit-and-groove marks are associated with human fertility, but the connection
is a logical one. If you can capture power where rain inseminates the earth, then
such an area would be a wise place to pray for pregnancy as well as for rain or
snow (Linea Sundstrom, personal communication 2002). Such prayers need not
be limited to women. Whitley argues that men may have created many of the
vulvaform petroglyphs in rituals connected with male fertility and potency
(Whitley 2000, 48, 98-101).

Moving On
At the 1993 ARARA conference, Don Christensen delivered a twenty-year anni-
versary retrospective for this organization. He said:

A large number of previously completed rock art studies show no

understanding of either the evolution of archaeological research in the
United States or the scientific method. For example, some avocational
rock art researchers start with preconceived perceptions of rock art
meaning that cannot possibly be substantiated by empirical evidence.
... these chimerical interpretations of rock art symbolism, while some-
times intriguing and obviously popular with the general public, do
nothing to advance the understanding of rock art or the comprehen-
sion of the cultures that produced the rock art (Christensen 1994, I),

He further suggests that members of the “rock art fraternity” have failed to chal-
lenge and criticize one anothers’ work. Because most know one another and are
friends, they instead have a tendency to embrace and restate each others’ hypothe-
ses, accepting them as dogma (1994, 5S). He provides no specific examples, but
the literature on western U.S. fertility and puberty-linked rock art supports his
conclusion well. Christensen exhorts members to be more careful and thorough,
to pay more attention to systematic testing of hypotheses and evaluation of the
84 CHAPTER 4

quality of ethnohistoric data. Fortunately, increasing numbers of researchers heed

his advice.

Note
I. Actual statistics about author demographics are probably invalid because I counted arti-
cles instead of authors, and a few authors wrote as many as ten articles each.
Separate Spheres: Who Made Rock Art? 5

as

HIS CHAPTER FOCUSES on trying to understand who made rock art, and
it begins to answer some “why” questions. Throughout most of the his-
tory of rock art studies, scholars assumed that only men made rock art.
This assumption must be examined carefully before we can move on to more
complicated questions, such as whether men’s and women’s rock art differs in
form and function, and whether thinking about the makers of rock art in terms
of two genders (or more) makes sense in the first place. Unfortunately, little
research to date has addressed the question of whether men’s and women’s rock
art differed in form or context, as well as the question of who depicted sexed
figures in what contexts.
Did women make rock art? Yes—women as well as men made rock art in
many parts of the world. We will revisit the misconceptions and the evidence
worldwide, then we will explore methods for answering the “who” question in
the absence of ethnographic and textual information. And we should always ask,
does knowing the sex or gender of those who made rock art matter?

Assumptions and Evidence

Rather than proceed with an assumption of my own, “scholars have assumed that
only men made rock art,” let us document that fact before we explore why this
was the case and then let us refute the assumption. Chapter 3 and many of its
source materials make it clear that scholars of Upper Paleolithic cave art, as well
as portable art, assumed that the artists were men (see also Russell 1991). As
early as 1870, popular reconstructions of prehistoric life depicted only men mak-
ing paintings (figure 3.1; see Conkey 1997). Prior to the 1980s, almost all text-
books refer to Paleolithic “man” and use the masculine pronoun to refer to artists.
The argument that the word “man” in the English language can refer to women
as well is weak; most of the time, especially in centuries past, the word “men”
clearly refers only to males. Consider the contexts. Proponents of the “erotica”

85
86 CHAPTER 5

theory clearly believed that only men would be interested in depicting female
bodies and body parts. Guthrie concludes his “erotica” argument with this: “I
cannot tell you what the people [who made Paleolithic cave art and figurines|
were saying, but I am confident that it was men who were talking—about hunt-
ing, sex, and fighting” (1979, 73). The converse—that women wishing for sexy
and productive partners to father their children might have made the pictures of
phallic males encountering large, dangerous beasts—never has appeared in print,
even as speculation. Neither proposition is likely to be true, of course, because
the evidence does not support the notion that rock art is about “wishes coming
true” in the first place.
Informal conversations with rock art researchers the world over (some of
which admittedly took place in bars) nonetheless suggest that male scholars still
support the assumption that women do not draw naked women and never have
(not in rock art, not anywhere). Female researchers don’t agree and can usually
cite some contemporary, anecdotal evidence wherein women are known to have
drawn naked women, for one reason or another. These include self-portraiture,
humor, spirituality (as in making Goddess altars), homoeroticism, and, of course,
during formal instruction in figure drawing. These contexts may not have analo-
gies in Ice Age Europe, but they do suggest that there is no inborn, universal,
hard-wired aversion to drawing naked women among anatomically modern
human females. Women are psychologically as well as technologically capable of
depicting naked women, in at least a few cultures. I strongly suspect the assump-
tion that women do not draw naked women, or at least that they do not enjoy it,
proceeds directly from the Victorian views that only men are active while women
are passive; that women’s bodies are for men to enjoy; that women make crafts,
not art; and that women who do make “art” are intriguing and dangerous excep-
tions. Perhaps it is too threatening to evision women artists enjoying the bodies
of other women?
The assumption that only men made rock art pervades rock art studies and
can seriously undermine the quality of research. For example, A. R. Willcox
(1959) studied distribution, shapes, and sizes of handprints on the western and
southwestern Cape in Southern Africa. He compared measurements of handprints
with hand lengths of hunter—gatherers and herders, subjecting the measurements
to a student's t-test. He concluded that the handprints in the rock art were made
by the hunter—gatherers. In a recent restudy of the evidence, William Van Ryssen
(1994) notes that Willcox compared only the hands of adult males, “without
having any indication of the age and gender of the makers of the handprints” and
“assumed that the handprints were all the work of adult males” (1994, 165-66).
Van Rujssen’s tests on the same data set suggest a great deal of overlap in the
 SEPARATE SPHERES 87

hand-length ranges for the two living populations (a simple enough statistical test
that Willcox failed to make). He concludes, based on spatial distribution of rock
art and other kinds of activity areas, that the handprints and certain other classes
of imagery were made by herders, not hunter—gatherers, and that gender attribu-
tion is not possible based on this evidence. Comparing the sizes and shapes of
handprints in rock art to hands of living people to differentiate men, women, and
children is an obvious strategy that has been attempted in many parts of the
world, with mostly inconclusive results, to which we shall return.
Every now and then, women and rock art are linked in the popular literature,
but the link is not always a sound one and may in fact reveal more than sexist
biases. A 1970s-era guidebook at the Museum of South African Rock Art at the
Johannesburg Zoological Gardens describes a Bushman engraving: “Giraffe. This
was probably done by a woman using a metal graver. A rock slide adjoins the site
and one can perhaps imagine her sketching on the rock while her children played
behind her.” Dowson and Lewis-Williams (1994b, 389) warn that “The trivial-
ity that explanations like these impute to the art is to be expected in a booklet
that reproduces the stereotype of the Bushmen as simple, carefree children.” Note
the display of this rock art at the zoo, not an art gallery or anthropology museum.
The guidebook attributes no religious or intellectual content to the art. By attrib-
uting its production to a woman, the pamphlet authors do not elevate the status
of Bushmen women, but rather they place the image in a “secular” realm, preclud-
ing the average white viewer from envisioning it in a “sacred” context.

Men and Art, Men and the Sacred

So much of the history of world rock art studies emanates from the study of
Paleolithic rock art in Europe. As noted in chapter 3, the abbé Breuil was con-
vinced that making art was a religious activity, so rock art had to have been done
by priests and shamans, who would have been male only, because in his experi-
ence, only men were priests. Leroi-Gourhan, Guthrie, Onians, and others thought
art was made by hunters, and in their understanding of world ethnography, only
men were hunters. Many believed that caves were too deep, dark, and difficult to
get into, and so would have been too frightening for women (Russell 1991),
As feminist anthropologists have pointed out for decades, the Western scholarly
tradition assumes that women remain bound to home, hearth, food preparation,
and child rearing for their entire lives. Feminist critics of archaeology have docu-
mented the projection into the past of present-day stereotypes of women as pas-
sive, uncreative, and subordinate to active, creative men (Watson and Kennedy
1991; Hays-Gilpin 2000d). In fact, women take part in many kinds of ritual
88 €GHARTER 5

activities in many parts of the world, especially after their child-bearing years.
Women, especially young women, often hunt small game. In a few hunter—
gatherer cultures, such as the Agta of the Philippines, women hunt as often as
men do (Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981). Fear of deep, dark places, is likely to
be learned and unlearnable, and therefore unlikely to be sex-linked (note that
today many cavers are women and a woman was first through the discovery hole
at Chauvet).
These stereotypes were projected not only into the past, but on to non-
Western cultures studied by early ethnographers. Spencer and Gillen’s (1899)
research on Australian Aborigines—the source of the hunting magic/totemism/
fertility interpretations of European Paleolithic rock art—portrayed Aboriginal
women as submissive, subordinate to men, and completely lacking in ritual or
artistic responsibilities. In this view, women were little better than slaves, and
their world was completely secular.
A more subtle influence may emanate from our use of the term rock “art” to
describe the drawings, paintings, and engravings in question. In the Western tradi-
tion, men and a few iconoclastic (and mostly upper-class) women do “art” while
most women and working-class men do “crafts” instead. One of the most unpro-
ductive arguments I ever had with a student was about this art—craft dichotomy.
He insisted that pottery and textiles were crafts and that painting was art, and
never mind paintings on pottery. Because they appear on pottery, they are clearly
craft, he said. I argued for breaking down this dichotomy and putting virtually
everything in some sort of multidimensional gray area, without boundaries. We
cannot know, I argued, what kind of values other cultures, especially past ones,
placed on decorated objects; the decoration on the objects; and the decoration of
rock, plaster, clay, or canvas surfaces. Are we really using some inherent aesthetic
qualities to assign images to “art” versus “craft,” or are we using the socioeco-
nomic class and gender of the makers to classify their products as art/superior
versus craft/inferior? When I played the gender card, the situation moved beyond
friendly sparring to threats, all of which was apparently not only unsettling but
downright insulting, as is most every encounter between dogma and critical think-
ing. When the critic threatens to undermine accepted hierarchies that have
become comfortable for those in the superior ranks, the defender threatens the
critic, as in this case. The point of this tale is that culturally specific cognitive
categories, and attempts to resist or disrupt them, have very real consequences in
day-to-day interactions among individuals: they often affect behavior, and they
can therefore drive change in the forms and contexts of visual expression, not
only in scholarship but other aspects of life as well.
Finally, the assumption that only men functioned as religious specialists can
 SEPARATE SPHERES 89

no longer be sustained. Because rock art researchers today attribute so much rock
art in the world to “shamans,” including that of Paleolithic Europe, as discussed
in the previous chapter, it’s necessary to define this term and examine the evidence
for the gender identities of shamans and other religious specialists who might
have produced rock art. According to Michael Harner, “A shaman may be defined
as a man or woman who is in direct contact with the spirit world through a trance
state and has one or more spirits at his command to carry out his bidding for
good or evil” (1973, xi). Some researchers, such as Alice Kehoe (1996, 2000)
and Esther Jacobson (1993; see chapter 10) argue that the term “shaman” should
only be applied in the area of the term’s origins—Siberia—but most anthropolo-
gists accept this term and apply it worldwide.
Were the shamans of prehistory only men? Unlikely. Dowson and Lewis-
Williams note that:

Amongst the Kalahari groups of the 1950s and 1960s, about half the
men and a third of the women were shamans. . . . Entering an altered
state of consciousness during a communal dance or in more solitary
circumstances, these shamans were believed to activate a supernatural
potency so that they could move between cosmological levels as they
performed such diverse tasks as curing the sick, making rain and con-
trolling animals. (Dowson and Lewis-Williams 1994b, 394)

The making of rock art is associated with shamanistic practices in Bushman cul-
ture of southern Africa. Rock art there is not just pictures of trance experience,
but reservoirs of power that could be tapped by trancing shamans (1994b, 395).
In addition, the art was implicated in the negotiation of gender roles (Parkington
1989; Solomon 1992), a case to which we will return in chapter 9.
Female shamans were also frequent in many, but not all, Native American
groups of the western United States; and in Korea more women than men served
their communities as shamans (Nelson 1993, 306-7). Perhaps most important,
shamans in many parts of the world do not conform to the same gender norms
as nonshamans (Mandt 2000; Hollimon 2001; Price in press; Saladin d’Anglure
1992). Some probably become shamans because they have ambiguous gender
identities to begin with, and some cross-dress or blend indicators of more than
one gender for spiritual reasons, such as to disguise themselves in the spirit world
or to merge their personal identities with spirit helpers of other genders (and of
other species).
Assuming that only men make rock art is not universal among rock art
researchers, and the balance is changing, particularly among researchers familiar
90° CHAPTER’ ©

with ethnography. Among some of the native peoples of Baja California, shamans
apparently took male initiates to secret places, possibly caves, to train; and at first
menses, a girl “is taken to a secluded spot and is put through a multi-day ordeal,
often in the company of adult women and under the direction of the shaman”
(Ritter 1994, 22), Eric Ritter, investigating rock art in this region, asks whether
female initiates experienced altered states of consciousness during these trials and
whether they could have produced the clusters of vulvaform petroglyphs found
in secluded sites. He concludes that “we cannot be certain. Perhaps the most
important point is that at least some of the rock art could be female-generated.
Undeniably, many interpretations of Baja California rock art are derived from a
masculine script. Female production, shamanistic or otherwise, must be consid-
ered a viable interpretation” (1994, 23). Although his reluctance to break out of
gender conventions is palpable, Ritter is one of the first authors since Emma Lou
Davis (1961) to explicitly consider the likelihood that women in the Californias
made rock. He also discusses the role of rock art in ideological and social systems
of past peoples within a framework that also considers population expansion,
cult activities, resource use, and the development of regional differences among
prehispanic cultures. Like Parkman’s and Whitley’s studies discussed in the previ-
ous chapter, Ritter’s is an anthropological study that aims to interpret rock art in
native terms, not to universalize it to the aesthetic or spiritual needs of middle-
class Euro-Americans.

Direct Evidence: Biometric

Many researchers examined handprints on the walls of Paleolithic caves and foot-
prints in the mud of their floors. They concluded that at least some were made
by women and children because they were “small” (perhaps relative to their own
hands?), that they were made by men because their palms were broad, that mixes
of sizes suggested families or initiation rites in which adults accompanied chil-
dren, and so forth. The fact that few researchers reached the same conclusions,
even using the same examples, suggests that the method is not accurate or that, as
in Willcox’s South African study, the methods employed were less than rigorous.
Examination of footprints in the recently discovered Chauvet Cave (chapter
3; Garcia 1999) and Steve Freers’ recent attempt to sex handprints in North
American rock art hold more promise. Freers begins with the generalization that
“Statistically, females tend to have shorter ring fingers than index fingers” or ring
and index fingers of nearly equal length, while in males, the ring finger tends to
be longer (Freers 2001, 320). In a sample of twentieth-century Native American
hands, length difference between the ring and index fingers was greater in males
 SEPARATE SPHERES 91

(about 4.6 millimeters ) than in females (about 2.3 millimeters). In addition,

males tend to have wider fingers than females, across all age groups.
It must be stressed that assigning gender to a handprint purely on measure-
ment results is an iffy proposition; however, if one were to observe a quality
handprint that had an index finger clearly longer than a ring finger, then one could
say with greater probability that the individual who made it was female (Freers
2001, 320). Freers tested his hypothesis at a San Luis Rey style site in southern
California, which can probably be attributed to fairly recent Luisefio, Cahuilla, or
Serrano girls’ ceremonies (chapter 6). Did the girls make the handprints, or did
male shamans directing the ceremony make them? Based on hand size, the sugges-
tion Freers was able to make was that most of the prints were probably made by
adolescents, but he was unable to determine their sex from relative finger lengths
in the handprints (2001, 321). Greer and Greer (1999) obtained similarly ambig-
uous results in trying to distinguish sex in a survey of handprints throughout
Montana, but they were able to distinguish probable child-sized prints. Freers
optimistically suggests that with more work on measurement techniques, finger
length might ultimately allow sex assignment, at least for groups of handprints.
He concludes that “Anthropometric gender assessment of pictograph hand prints
is a fragile endeavor. What
7
strengthens gender assignment, as in any other
assumption in rock art studies, is the supporting evidence and underlying ethnog-
raphy” (2001, 331).

Direct Evidence: Eyewitness Accounts

Documentation of rock art production by girls in the context of puberty rites
and vision quests is well documented for southern California and the Columbia
Plateau, cases taken up in detail in chapter 6. Persistently sexist skeptics may still
argue that a woman’s puberty rite 1s likely to be the only important ritual event
in her life, so very little rock art production likely results from it, leaving the
majority of rock art production to be explained by the lifelong ritual activities of
males. But this conclusion, too, would oversimplify matters.
For the Vedda people of Sri Lanka, rock art production ts apparently neither
ritual nor masculine. Discussing drawings on the back wall of a cave (like those
in figure 2.6, p. 22); Seligman and Seligman state that:

The drawings were usually made by women, who said they did them
when they were waiting for the men to return from hunting, apparently
merely to amuse themselves. We feel confident that no magical import
attaches to these pictures, the usual subjects of which are men and
women, various animals and the hide vessel . . . in which honey ts cole
92 CHAPTERS

lected. Ashes were mixed with a little saliva in the palm of the hand
and streaked on to the rock with the forefinger of the right hand, the
spots of the leopard being put in with a charcoal paste prepared in the
same manner. ([1911] 1969, 319)

Although anthropometry remains undeveloped and although direct evidence

for women’s producing rock art is scarce, direct evidence for men’s producing
rock art remains scarce as well. Very few eyewitness accounts of rock art produc-
tion have been recorded in any given area, for a number of reasons. First, few
ethnographers have been interested enough in rock art to write about it. Second,
even when male anthropologists are investigating masculine activities, one would
not expect to witness the making of rock art very often. When anthropologists
ask about rock art production in societies that still have knowledge of the process,
making rock art never emerges as something that people did daily. Rock art often
was made by individuals or small groups, in the course of activities that take place
away from settlements, as part of initiations, pilgrimages, and private or small
group rituals. Don Talayesva’s account of the all-male Hopi salt trail pilgrimage
is one of a handful of texts about rock art production in the southwestern United
States. Men carved their clan symbols on rocks at a particular shrine along the
trail each time they made the trip (Simmons 1942, 235). Even in cultures where
rock art is a secular activity—such as for the Navajo children who draw horses
and cars to pass the time while herding sheep, or for the Plains warriors who
rendered biographical scenes on cliff faces (as they did on bison hides and in
ledgers )—it is often done alone and at some distance from the home, away from
the watchful eyes of the family’s resident anthropologist.

Indirect Evidence: Ethnography, Traditional Histories, and

Context
While researchers have no difficulty attributing rock art to men, especially ritual
specialists, in the absence of eyewitness accounts, the same inferential reasoning
has not been applied to the question of women’s making .rock art. To assume
that men painted most pictures of men and masculine activities—for example,
hunting—and that women painted pictures of themselves and their activities—
such as food plants or basket making—is better than simply assuming that men
must have produced all rock art; but this hypothesis clearly can’t withstand con-
frontation by ethnographic evidence. Where we know the sex of the artist, both
men and women often produce a great variety of subject matter, including indi-
viduals of the opposite sex. As well, many figurative rock art traditions rarely, or
 SEPARATE SPHERES 93

even never, include indications of sex, and others frequently depict scenes of males
and females interacting. Nonetheless, where gendered division of labor is well
understood by means of ethnographic data or burial accouterments, looking for
identifiable subject matter known to be associated with men’s or women’s activi-
ties 1s one potential place to start. Three case studies of reasoning from docu-
mented activities to women’s rock art production should suffice to make the case
that some rock art in at least several parts of the world was at least as likely to
have been made by women as by men. We travel first to the North American
plains, thence to Australia, and finally to California. Last, we explore the question
of reasoning from dichotomous styles to infer that men and women made differ-
ent kinds of rock art.

DREAMING OF DOUBLE WOMAN ON THE NORTHERN PLAINS Among

the Dakota and Lakota people of the northern Plains, the most important reli-
gious experience an individual could have was a vision. Some sources say that
while boys and men often sought visions, the experience came unbidden to girls
and women, often during puberty or other stressful times. Other sources indicate
that girls and women did seek visions; for example, a girl might seek a vision by
placing her first menstrual bundle in the crook of a tree, or she might have one
during a night of isolation preceding a Buffalo Sing held to honor her first men-
struation (Sundstrom 2002a, [OO—101). Both men and women received visions
or dreams related to healing, ceremonies, and warfare, but women most often
received dreams conferring skills and designs for craft work, healing, or aid in
securing a husband. Linea Sundstrom’s extensive analysis of northern Plains rock
art and ethnography suggests that some rock art was produced by women who
had particular kinds of visions (Sundstrom 2002a, 2002b). Like men, women
dreamed of birds, animals, natural phenomena, and spiritual beings, but the only
vision experienced primarily by women was that of Double Woman:

In the Dakota-Lakota beliefs, Double Woman is a complex supernatu-

ral being representing a set of dualities linked to womanhood: good
and evil, modesty and promiscuity, motherhood and childlessness, and
industriousness and laziness. She is the inventor of quillwork (elaborate
embroidery of animal hides with colored porcupine quills) and 1s
source of artistic talent among women. She is the benefactor of women
artists and quillworking societies. (Sundstrom 2002a, 100)

Double Woman was envisioned, and sometimes enacted in ceremonies, as two

tall women connected by a cord from which a doll or ball dangled, representing
94 CHAPTER 5

a baby that would not survive—that is, indicating that the women would never
be mothers (Sundstrom 2002a, 102). Her/their behavior included unrestrained,
raucous laughter, and other ways of expressing an ability to invert gender norms.
Double Woman is associated with rocks and the world below, and so are spiders;
Double Woman was said to be able to suspend herself from a cord like a spider.
She was also associated with deer and bison (the bison represent good mothers;
the deer represent bad mothers, seductresses, and so forth).
Women who dreamed of Double Woman could become skillful craft special-
ists. They could forgo marriage and childbearing, and support themselves by pro-
ducing fine quillwork, leather work, and other crafts. They might live alone or set
up a household with another Double Woman dreamer. Or one might simply
receive assistance in her quillwork. Double Woman seems to have conferred a
good deal of latitude to her protégés, from conforming to feminine ideals to their
antitheses. A man who dreamed of Double Woman might thereafter live as a
woman (Sundstrom 2002a, 102).
Several sources written between the 1830s and 1880s suggest traditions that
Double Woman made rock art. Several texts record stories of female spirits that
dwell in boulders and make rock art; of sounds like hammering and women’s
laughter; and sparks of light in the night, where petroglyphs could be seen the
next morning. Oral traditions at several particular sites, including Pipestone, Min-
nesota, and Ludlow Cave, South Dakota, include references to “two women” who
create and periodically renew rock art (2002a, 105). “In practical terms,” Sunds-
trom notes, “this suggests that Double Woman dreamers made some rock art.”
Throughout the American West, native peoples rarely distinguish between the
actions of humans and of their spirit helpers because their identities are merged.
“This means that rock art said to be the work of female spirits (like Double
Woman) may have been made by women influenced by such spirits” (2002a,
106). Sundstrom, then, effectively argues that oral traditions support the possibil-
ity that at least some rock art on the northern Plains was made by women.
Can we distinguish rock art made by women who dreamed of Double
Woman from other rock art in this region? “Although the ethnographic literature
provides little description of Double Woman rock art, a set of rock art compris-
ing bison and deer tracks, human vulvas, handprints, footprints, and abraded
grooves is a good candidate” (Sundstrom 2002a, 107; see figures Salanial 5.2).
First, the distribution of this rock art style includes the known territorial range
of the Dakota and Lakota groups. Concentrations appear in the Black Hills, rec-
ognized as a homeland and especially important sacred area for the Lakota; and
at Ludlow Cave where, as noted, oral traditions attribute the rock art to Double
Woman. Second, many Native American cultures, including the Lakota and
 SEPARATE SPHERES 95

Fig. 5.1 Panel of abraded bison and deer tracks, North Cave Hills, South Dakota. Photo by Linea
Sundstrom (2002a, fig. 3), reprinted with permission.

Dakota, metaphorically link animal tracks and human vulvas with each other and
with women’s seductive powers. They likewise link deer and some women—Deer
Woman, another supernatural being, is a seducer. The human hand- and footprint
glyphs are not as easily linked to Double Woman; but they may represent points
of contact with the spirit world, or they may simply be the human equivalent of
animal tracks (Sundstrom 2002a, 107). Not all rock art in this widespread style
was associated with Double Woman, but some likely was.
Third, the abraded grooves probably resulted from sharpening tools such as
bone awls. For the Lakota and Dakota people, the awl “is both an essential tool
and a symbol of mature femininity and the integral role of women in the survival
of family and community” (Sundstrom 2002a, 100; Spector 1993). Women’s
puberty rites included four days in a menstrual lodge, constantly working with
leather and quills. Porcupine quill embroidery was considered a sacred task. Add-
ing dyed porcupine quill decoration to garments or moccasins gave their wearers
supernatural protections and could also express a girl’s vision or desire to attain
a vision. A girl’s quillwork became the basis for her social status. Following her
puberty rite, the quality and quantity of her quillwork would play a large role in
96 CHAPTER 5

Namie
Fig. 5.2 Abraded grooves for making and sharpening awls, French Creek, Black Hills, South
Dakota. Photo by Linea Sundstrom (2002a, fig. 4; 2002b, fig. 9), reprinted with permission.

attaining the status of “buffalo woman,” a woman who was as essential to her
community as was the buffalo (Sundstrom 2002a, 107-8).
Prior to the introduction of metal tools, a woman’s tool kit consisted mainly
of bone tools that needed periodic sharpening. “The grooves used for making
and renewing bone awls were symbols of, and prayers for, success in womanly
endeavors from craftwork to childbearing” (Sundstrom 2002a, 109).

Since Double Woman, the ultimate artist, was said to dwell within the
rock, it is likely that some of her essence was thought to be transferred
to the tool itself and, thus, to the items the woman made for her fami-
ly’s use. The prolonged rhythmic grinding motion may have promoted
a trance state in which the person making the tool (and the rock art)
might be more receptive to a vision. (Sundstrom 2002a, 109)

For those who dreamed of Double Woman, then, the grooves and other images
in the rock art complex not only reflected, but were an integral part of, producing
their own alternative constructions of womanhood, focused on craft production.
The archaeological evidence is consistent with Sundstrom’s interpretation: the
 SEPARATE SPHERES oF

vulva-track-groove rock art style coincides with known vision quest sites, caves
containing offerings of many kinds including awls, and, in one case, a bas-relief
of a buffalo cow with her newborn calf (figure 5.3). The lack of detail in the
ethnographic record does not undermine her argument. Lakota men reportedly
feared Double Woman dreamers and probably avoided discussing them. Few eth-
nographers talked with Lakota women, and women’s religious societies were
largely able to keep their secrets from anthropologists, missionaries, and others.
Nonetheless, Sundstrom found a 1930s photograph of abraded grooves in the
Black Hills with a note on the back identifying the subject as a rock where Indian
women sharpened their tools (Sundstrom 2002b, 82), suggesting that some
knowledge of the association between the rock art and women continued into the
twentieth century.
Two historical factors easily explain the demise of the practice of making and
renewing this rock art complex—the introduction and spread of metal awls for

ed
20cm

Fig. 5.3 Buffalo cow and calf, with grooves and vulva forms, Ludlow Cave, South Dakota. Scale
is 20 centimeters. Drawing by Linea Sundstrom (2002b, fig. 8), reprinted with permission.
98 CHAPTER 5S

women’s crafts, which women began to use instead of bone awls as early as 1700,
and conversion to Christianity (2002a, 116). Sundstrom suggests the step from
a Double Woman quilling society to a Saint Mary quilting society was not a large
one for Lakota women, but their rock art production ceased.

WOMEN’S BUSINESS IN AUSTRALIA — Rock art in Australia includes some of

the oldest imagery in the world, perhaps dating as early as 40,000 B.p. Most
depicts human and animal figures with no sex indicated. More animals than
humans seem to be sexed, and the frequency of sexed figures varies enormously
across time and space. Few figures depict sex until relatively recent times. Yet
because rock art was assumed to have been produced in ritual contexts, it was
assumed to have been produced by men only. The first assumption is probably
sound, but the conclusion only follows if one assumes that women had no ritual
responsibilities or that their ritual roles never involved painting.
Early ethnographers Spencer and Gillen saw a few Aboriginal men making
paintings (1899, 179-80) and assumed that only men painted. They also saw a
great deal of men’s ritual activities and little to nothing of women’s. They there-
fore assumed that women did not practice ritual activities and did not have ritual
knowledge. Diane Bell writes:

Armed with diverse theoretical weaponry such as Marxian class analy-

sis, Levi-Straussian structuralism, Durkhetmian dualism, and psycho-
analysis, the practitioners of the “Man equals Culture” paradigm have
sought to explain women’s secondary position in terms of economic
markers, in the realm of symbolism, social organization and kinship.
They have cast women as the profane, the “other”, the devalued, the
wild, the feared and the excluded, the substance of symbols but never
the makers of their own social reality, the exploited and dominated,
but never the decision making adult. As ethnopsychiatrist John Cawte
so gaily puts it, women are the “feeders, breeders and follow-the-
leaders.” (Bell 1993, 242)

If women also made paintings, would male ethnographers have seen them?
Probably not. Historically, many Australian hunter-gatherer tribes divided ritual
practice along gender lines, and secrecy was strictly enforced. When women began
doing ethnography in Australia in the twentieth century, they found that women
made art. Women had sacred sites and sacred boards. They had ritual responsibil-
ities for caring for shrines and resource areas, and they even played important
roles in male initiation ceremonies (Berndt 1981; Bell 1993).
 SEPARATE SPHERES 99

Recent ethnographers working in this area have emphasized that “in this
region men and women constitute different social groups, each of which operates
independently in economic, religious and ideological spheres. Men generally asso-
ciate with men and women generally associate with women... . [but] facets from
each sphere are exchanged between them” (Smith 1993, 161); in addition,
women in many tribes clearly have important ritual knowledge and responsibili-
ties. Diane Bell worked among several central desert tribes, the Warlpiri and
Kaytej, and concluded that:

In Central Australia where male and female worlds are substantially

independent of one another in economic and ritual terms, men and
women elaborate separate gender-specific power bases. The cultural
ramifications of the separation of the sexes are so far-reaching that they
may preclude one from evaluating or comparing the contribution of
each sex to their society within one domain. (Bell 1993, 23)

Men and women tactfully avoid each other’s “business”:

Men avoid all paths which lead by or to the camps of women and not
infrequently travel circuitous routes to avoid passing near or stumbling
upon women at business. The women, like the men, may keep men
tactfully informed, for example, by wearing their ritual designs after
the ceremony, the exact nature of which must remain unknown to the
men. (Bell 1993, 37)

Historical sources suggest that women were intimately familiar with the land
and had land rights. They knew of sacred objects; female sacred objects and sites
existed; and sacred objects were brought to women’s camps (Bell 1993, SI).
Women painted their bodies, sacred boards, and other items with designs based
on their hereditary rights to ‘‘Dreamings,” or spiritual connections to specific
landscapes.
Why not rock art? If we have no direct “whitefella” eye-witness evidence that
women in Australia made rock art, can we still infer that they did? Josephine
Flood asked Wardamam consultants, “Who can paint?” Answer: “Anyone.”

Q: Can men paint?

A: Yes, anyone.
Q: Can women paint?
A: Yes, anyone. (Smith 199], 46)
100 CHAPTER $

If women can paint and are known to retouch certain existing paintings (Smith
1991, 46; Layton 1992, 21, 47) in some parts of Australia, why attribute all rock
art to men only?
Is it tmportant to attribute the art at all? Might it be enough to simply dem-
onstrate that regardless of who made the paintings, they can tell us something
interesting about gender arrangements in Aboriginal Australia? Recently, several
archaeologists have investigated women’s roles in Aboriginal Australia using rock
art and related paintings. Claire Smith (1993) studied contemporary Aboriginal
acrylic paintings that draw on rock art imagery to see if women and men use
different motifs. She found that their design repertoires overlap a great deal,
though the most complicated motifs tend to appear in men’s paintings. She con-
cludes that both men and women have rights to paint designs based on their
ancestral Dreamings.
Julie Drew (1995) conducted a wide survey of Australian rock art for evi-
dence, or lack thereof, for gender separation; Are gender-exclusive patterns
depicted? Or is a more integrated symbolic system based in gender complementar-
ity more likely? She began with published rock art and immediately noted that
most researchers had identified human figures with no distinguishing sex charac-
teristics as male. Reanalyzing these figures in detail, she found that a majority
were undifferentiated, or neutral, and that there was no formal basis for having
identified them as male. Researchers had merely assumed a figure was male unless
it had obvious feminine features. In Drew’s typology,

the female motif is defined by a minimum shape of head, body, two

legs, and arms with breasts depicted on either side of the body and
vulva, which may be depicted as being internal or external to the body.
The same minimum shape applies for male figures but without breasts
and with an appendage longer than it is wide, and shorter than the legs,
commonly known as a penis (which needs to be distinguished from a
lizard’s tail). Neutral human figures are undifferentiated by breasts or
genitalia or markings between the legs. Some neutral human figures
may be children while some may be just smaller figures. (Drew 1995,
105)

Drew compared anthropomorphic figures in five regions of Australia and

found that proportions of male and female figures vary a great deal, and so do
their distinguishing features and their contexts. Regional differences are strong.
In some areas, women are distinguished from men by breasts, but in the Warda-
man areas, the females are identified with vulvas instead. Female figures aren't
ce
 SEPARATE SPHERES 10]

peripheral in rock art sites, but they are often central and highly decorated. She
found no evidence for separation into “site types,” such as birth sites versus hunt-
ing sites. In some areas, females are often paired with a male, and sometimes men
and women are depicted together as “social actors” in groups. Across northern
Australia, approximately equal numbers of males to females are depicted, but in
southern Australia, neutral figures predominate, suggesting that the art is inclusive
of both genders. Nonetheless, Christine Stephenson (2000) recounts that local
guides interpreting rock sites in southern Australia tell visitors that men made all
the rock art, even at sites otherwise interpreted as women’s camps.

DICHOTOMOUS ROCK ART TECHNIQUES IN THE MOJAVE DESERT:

DIVISION OF LABOR? Don Christensen and Jerry Dickey recorded both pet-
roglyph and pictograph sites in California’s Mojave Desert. Technology (engrav-
ing/ pecking vs. painting), style, and content overlap somewhat, but context (site
setting, artifact assemblages) differs. There is no evidence that engravings and
paintings were made at different times or by different ethnic groups, though these
remain possible explanations for the differences. They suggest that the paintings
may have been done by women and the engravings by men. “At, or reasonably
near, all of the painted sites, there is a preponderance of artifacts indicative of
female activities: milling stones for food processing, ceramic sherds from food
storage and meal preparation, and fire-cracked rock from hearths” (1996, 49),
There were also chipped stone tools, including projectile points and debitage,
suggesting male tasks, based on local ethnography. The pictographs seem to be
located in habitation areas, and both men and women would have had access to
them. Abstract linear designs resembling basketry designs historically made by
women dominate the element repertoire of the paintings, while depictions of sha-
mans, animals, and weapons are absent. These elements do appear in the engrav-
ings, or petroglyphs. Division of labor along gender lines, then, may account for
pictograph—petroglyph differences in this area, where we do have good ethno-
graphic evidence for the kinds of tasks undertaken by men and women apart from
making rock art, as well as evidence that women “dreamed” their basketry designs.
On the other hand, the authors acknowledge possible differences in imagery pro-
duced by shamans (who might be both men and women) and nonshamans, or by
technological constraints of the different media. They suggest greater attention
to pigment preparation processes (which involves grinding, something that Great
Basin women do frequently in the course of food preparation) and to trade routes
by which pigments were obtained. Christensen and Dickey cautiously conclude,
“East Mojave pictographs could have been produced by females on the basis of
production method, location, and the presence and absence of certain motifs.
102) GHAPTER SS

Whether this is a reflection of a female shaman’s trance, an ecstatic experience

involving an initiation ritual supervised by a shaman, or individual ‘dreaming’ is
not apparent” (1996, SI).

Without Ethnography: Style and Content

Can we tell who made rock art if we don’t have ethnographic evidence like that
described here? Perhaps, but the ethnographic record will probably always have
to play a role at some level because males and females have substantially the same
neurological wiring, the same sensory apparatus, and the same range of motor
skills (but see Falk 1997 for consideration of posited differences). Males and
females are therefore biologically capable of making the same range of graphic
images using the same range of techniques. Biology, then, is no help. We have to
rely on culturally constructed differences to discern differences in image making.
These may be more or less tied to physiological experiences, partly sex-based
aspects of gender, but they are more likely to be tied to work roles, ritual respon-
sibilities, and other aspects of gender that do not necessarily proceed from sex.
We may be able to make a few generalizations, at least within broad regional
traditions, but a number of problematic assumptions have to be made and clearly
explained. If we assume two dominant gender categories corresponding to our
concepts of “men” and “women” in past societies, we can search for binary pat-
terning in content, style, or both. If we find dualistic patterns, we can then
hypothesize that gender has something to do with them; but our work is far from
done.
We must simultaneously formulate multiple working hypotheses centered on
chronological considerations, age grading, ethnicity, and function. In the absence
of helpful data pertaining to one or more of these, we would have to make the
conscious assumption that our two styles are, for example, contemporaneous and
of the same ethnic tradition. Two approaches, focusing on content and style, will
be explored here; neither should be expected to “work” all of the time, even if
our prior assumptions are valid.
Some cultures partition decorative styles or techniques along gender lines. By
studying decorative styles of many media—such as pottery, basketry, textiles,
woodworking, and, where possible, body painting and tattoos—we should be
able to discover whether different styles were used for different kinds of items.
The next task is to find out whether these styles coincide with a gendered division
of labor in craft production, gendered differences in clothing and adornment,
both, or neither. Finally, we can compare rock art imagery to the style and content
of these other media.
 SEPARATE SPHERES 103

Focusing on style and context, rather than content, is a more subtle and diffi-
cult approach, but for some traditions this probably produces more reliable indi-
cators of who made what. In many parts of the world, but by no means most,
rectilinear versus curvilinear styles—or representational versus geometric styles,
for example—are gendered “masculine” and “feminine,” respectively. Nancy
Munn's (1973) study of Warlpiri iconography in central Australia suggests that
circles and curvilinear elements often refer to breasts and other feminine-gendered
attributes or ideas, while straight lines refer to masculine ideals; but the whole
point of her analysis is to illustrate the complexity of a system based on what
look like very simple figures. The simpler the figure—say, a mere circle or a
line—the more simultaneous meanings it can carry. So while gender might be one
kind of meaning, the gendered meanings of the imagery might not have anything
to do with the gender of the maker or user. Sometimes “masculine” and “femi-
nine” imagery or styles do indeed coincide with a division of labor in using
dichotomous styles, but this fact cannot always be assumed.
In the Four Corners area of the American Southwest, dry rock shelters pre-
serve decorated basketry, textiles, pottery, and rock art from the a.p. 600s. Bas-
kets, textiles, and pottery bear decoration made up of small, repeated, rectilinear
geometric elements, mostly arranged with rotational symmetry (Hays 1992;
Hays-Gilpin 2000b). Rock art, both paintings and engravings, includes some
geometric elements, such as zigzags and dots, but it emphasizes life forms, curvi-
linearity, and bilateral and translational symmetry and asymmetry. A grid-based
technology tends to constrain textile and basketry designs to repeated rectilinear
elements, but the same is not true of pottery. Pottery could have been painted
like rock art, with free-flowing curvilinear lines, but this treatment was extremely
rare. Mortuary evidence associating the production of pottery, baskets, and off-
loom textiles with women suggests the geometric style may have referred to wom-
en’s work, and it may even have been deployed to assert women’s responsibility
over certain kinds of work and certain domestic spaces within pithouse villages
at this time. In contrast, rock art is more varied and overlaps very little with
women’s crafts, except for a grooved style with repeated rectilinear geometric
units on horizontal boulders near pithouses. These may partly result from sharp-
ening the bone awls used to make baskets. Rock art, then, may have been done
by a variety of people, including men; and painted, pecked, curvilinear, and repre-
sentational styles may have been produced primarily by men (figure S.4).
Later in the same region, in the 1200s, an elaborate geometric style primarily
associated with loom-woven textiles cross-cuts pottery, textiles, basketry and rock
art, although rock art remains more diverse than styles on other media. This style,
based on interlocking frets and sawtooth lines, probably arrived in the Puebloan
104. CHAPTER 5S

Fig. 5.4 Dichotomous decorative styles in Basketmaker portable items and rock art. Red and
black decorated baskets; polychrome tump band; two twined aprons in black, brown, and
yellow; two black-on-gray bowls; petroglyphs; and white painted bird pictograph. Not to scale.
Drawings by Kelley Hays-Gilpin.

area with the introduction of cotton and the loom from the south in the a.p.
1000s. Mortuary evidence as well as direct historical evidence suggest that loom-
weaving became the responsibility of men, while pottery remained women’s work.
The frequent appearance of textilelike designs in both rock art and pottery at this
time suggests that both men and women shared a decorative style, but it does not
tell us who made the rock art. Does it matter in this case who made the rock art?
 SEPARATE SPHERES 105

Can we envision both men and women taking part in kin-based networks of
exchange, using decorative styles to tie into particular trade networks or systems
of religious and political alliance?

Why?
Marcia-Anne Dobres (1995b, 63) says it’s worthwhile “to ask why we feel com-
pelled to identify ‘who did what’ in prehistory.” These claims are important in
the present, and “we assume a fundamental relationship exists between these per-
sona and the underlying value systems supporting and structuring social identity.”
Gender and other socially constituted identities such as kin, class, and race, pro-
vide individuals with sociopolitical rank and status. Gender serves to define asso-
ciated privileges, rights, and responsibilities—and especially work roles. Gender
attribution is about value systems, but when we strive to attribute certain kinds
of work, especially work we feel must have been done by high-status individuals,
we are probably thinking more about our own European and Euro-American
value systems. Before we can understand prehistoric value systems about what it
meant to do certain kinds of work, including making rock art, we need to know
a lot more about how we have been projecting our value systems into the past;
then we need a lot more evidence for gender arrangements in the past than mere
gender—work attribution.
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Life Cycles and Puberty Rites 6

ea

It is not that the material world, as a form of cultural discourse, reflects the
natural division of the world into women and men, but rather that cultural
discourses, including the organization of the material world, actually produces
gender difference in and through their workings,

-—HENRIETTA MOORE (1994, 85)

OCK ART RARELY just reflects beliefs; it also takes an active role in creat-
ing and perpetuating beliefs, ritual practice, and even social arrangements.
The practices of making and viewing rock art help create and renegotiate
gender systems, especially in the context of rites of passage. “Puberty rites” have
long been a mainstay of cultural anthropology, and they have often served as an
“explanation” for rock art. A couple of examples will suffice, again drawn from
Paleolithic France and the recent prehistory and history of western North
America.
As noted in chapter 3, John Pfeiffer, in The Creative Explosion (1982), suggests
that French Paleolithic cave paintings are most parsimoniously interpreted as the
material residues of initiations of young people into the rigors of adult life in the
Ice Age. Pfeiffer focuses on functional reasons for linking ritual and drama in
dark, inaccessible places with the passing down of knowledge crucial for survival
in a harsh natural environment and increasingly complex and densely populated
social environment. While Pfeiffer, and other scholars of the 1980s, no longer
assume only men made and used cave paintings and other rock art, the food quest
takes priority in their explanations, and gender is taken for granted, Puberty rites
help make successful adults, but they usually also make specific kinds of adults:
men, women, and in some cases, adults with other gender identities. As part ofa
broad movement away from ecodeterminism to more complicated socially ori-
ented studies, archaeologists are beginning to develop archaeologies of life cycles.

107
108 CHAPTER 6

Archaeology of Life Cycles

Although seniority always intersects with gender, the former is often far more
important than the latter in structuring social arrangements; but different com-
munities recognize different life stages among their members. In Mesoamerica,
for example, gender is never independent of age, and age strongly determines rela-
tive standing in the community (Joyce 2000b, 182). That age was an important
axis of differentiation in the region for a very long time can be inferred by exam-
ining depictions of the human form from many times and regions. Lesure’s
(1997) analysis of figurines from Formative Period Chiapas reveals a strong
dichotomy, but not between males and females. Groups of seated figurines depict
both males and females as aged (with wrinkles) and wealthy (based on clothing
and adornment), while armless standing nudes appear to represent youthful
females. Formative figurines from Chalcatzingo depict series of female life stages
(Cyphers Guillén 1993), Tlatilco burials have no clear markings of sex, but age
classes extend across the sexes JJoyce 2000b, 183).
At any given moment, juveniles might have made up at least half or more of
the individuals in a prehistoric community. Little systematic attention to the
physical presence of children, their roles, activities, and identities appears in the
archaeological literature to date, paralleling the past neglect of women. Children
are feminized in that they are classified as not male, not powerful, and lacking
agency (Rothschild 2002). Because children are not expected to be economically
productive in our own culture, we miss the important roles children held in the
past—in food production and processing, procuring firewood, taking care of
younger children, and even craft production. As with gender, and often closely
linked to gender, the cultural construal of age difference varies and changes.
An archaeology of children is slowly emerging (Deverenski 2000; Kamp
2002; Lillehammer 1989; Roveland 1997). What did dying young mean in the
ancient Egyptian village of Deir el Medina, where burials were segregated by age
(Meskell 1994, 1999)? Does examining children’s labor cross-culturally put chil-
dren into the picture of prehistoric farming villages in the southwestern United
States? How do “toys” and “play” fit into frameworks for learning survival skills
and economically important tasks such as making pottery (Kamp 2002)? How
does Mesoamerican iconography reveal socially defined transitions, life-cycle
events, and even the cultural construction of sex differences through life-cycle
events (Joyce 2000b)?
In Western culture today, children are thought to have innate sexual identities;
they simply need to be taught how to behave as good exemplars of their sex. But
Aztec adults “worked to craft new people out of the raw material of infants and
 LIFE CYCLES AND PUBERTY RITES 109

children” (Joyce 2000b, 146). Joyce’s craft production metaphor is deliberate—it

reflects Aztec metaphorical speeches addressed to pregnant women in which chil-
dren are likened to feathers, to maguey about to sprout and blossom, and to chips
of flint. A child is a product made by the gods, with the help of humans who
perform the required ritual actions. In another Aztec metaphor, giving birth was
said to be like taking a captive in battle. The child is seen as nonhuman at birth,
but adults and the gods begin to make it human and gendered when the umbilical
cord is buried—by the hearth if the child is to be made a girl, on the battlefield
if it is to be made a boy (2000b, 147). Next, a bathing ceremony used miniature
versions of adult tools, weapons, and clothing, not the everyday child’s dress that
would be worn in nonritual contexts. Additional sequences of changes in hair,
costume, and ornaments created social identities, as well as adult gender and work
roles. Joyce concludes, “Where European ideologies view maturation and per-
sonal identity as inevitable expressions of natural essences, Aztec ideology, like
other Native American ideologies, viewed personal identity as something that
required work to produce and was open to much wider variation” (2000b, I50).

Rock Art and Puberty Rites Reconsidered

Ethnographies from many parts of the world show that producing paintings and
engravings has often been part of the work of producing adults, reinforcing and
at the same time creating or changing particular gender ideologies and gender
roles. In this series of case studies, I begin with Iron Age Europe, a time for which
no ethnography is available, and I proceed to two contrasting cases in the western
United States, where ethnographic evidence has recently been coupled with rock
art studies to elucidate the roles of rock art and rites of passage for creating gen-
dered adults.

Making Men in Iron Age Europe

John Robb (1997) explores gender symbols in southern European representa-
tional art, mortuary assemblages, skeletal biology, and classical period texts. He
concludes that violence and weapons have long been core symbols of adult mascu-
linity there since the Bronze Age. Iron Age associations between males and weap-
ons are frequent in burial assemblages and rock art depictions. He treats Latin
texts about active males and passive females—as well as texts about aggression,
domination, and humiliation between two active males—as potentially represent-
ing a cultural tradition with deep roots, perhaps Bronze Age roots, in the region
(Robb 1997, 55). Over time, weapons also became symbols of socioeconomic
and political status as well as gender identity. By Roman times, only elite men
110 CHAPTER 6

could bear swords, for example. The Iron Age rock art depicting men and weap-
ons, then, may refer to ideal gender categories and roles that not every male could
expect to achieve, depending on wealth and class.
Barfield and Chippindale (1997) reject such “text-aided” applications of his-
torical analogy from Indo-European warrior roles to prehistoric Iron Age rock
art, but they do reach some similar conclusions about rock art, gender, and status.
They conclude—based on the patterning and the exceptions to the patterning in
the engravings of Mount Bego, southern France; the burials; and the other arti-
factual evidence—that “the physical expressions of male sexuality, of masculine
social position, and monumental burial are made with a common vocabulary of
form” (1997, 119) throughout southern Europe. Daggers and halberds here
mean “male” in a general way, but more important, they are emblems of adult
males. Figures of cattle, ploughs, and field systems, with or without actual depic-
tions of phallic humans, reflect status and wealth, as well as masculinity. They
serve as statements that “the social persona of the male adult is not clearly distin-
guished from social prestige in the form of wealth, nor indeed from sexual-
fertility symbolism” (1997, 120). The act of making the figures, and being
allowed to make the figures, perhaps as part of initiation ceremonies, was likely
the point, they argue (1997, 122), The rock engravings do not just reflect prevail-
ing ideas about masculinity for Iron Age Europeans; they were actually made by
individual males as part of becoming men.

Studying Puberty Rites in Western North America

Some indigenous people were still making rock art in the far western United
States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the aid of ethnog-
raphy, study of the specific cultural contexts of rock art yields a richer and more
nuanced understanding of social processes there, and it provides some important
cautions and clarifications about interpreting rock art. Some of this recent rock
art can be linked via ethnography to puberty rites. The roles and meanings of
puberty-related rock art on the Columbia Plateau region and in southern Califor-
nia are distinct, resulting from different cultural contexts for young people’s
changing status, although both are ultimately rooted in a common historical sub-
strate involving the acquisition of personal spirit helpers.
The history of anthropology reveals oscillations between emphasizing com-
monalities and differences, as when Franz Boas advocated historical particularism
in reaction to the excesses of evolutionists who wanted to classify each human
culture on a ladder of ascending complexity and even, in some cases, ascending
morality. Anthropological attention to puberty rites has appeared in both general-
 LIFE CYCLES AND PUBERTY RITES IIl

izing and particularizing contexts. Boas launched detailed studies of western Indi-
ans, facilitating Kroeber’s monumental Handbook of California Indians (92S )eThis
volume presents brief descriptions of girls’ puberty rites for nearly every tribe in
that state. Kroeber’s work in turn provided data for Harold Driver's more exten-
sive comparative study of girls’ puberty rites in western North America, published
in 194]. Driver notes in his introduction that his purpose is not to explain
puberty rites but to use the unusually detailed data set about them to demonstrate
appropriate statistical methods for comparing cultures using culture trait lists.
Joseph Jorgensen’s 1980 assessment of the topic draws on Driver's data, but he
uses them to reveal historical connections among tribes and to explore links
between the economic bases of western Indian cultures and patterns of ritual prac-
tice.
Systematic comparison of Far Western puberty rites for girls identified a few
features that most hold in common: belief that menstrual blood is dangerous and
polluting to spiritual things as well as to hunting and fishing, and that menstrual
blood offends bears and invites bear attacks; group performance of a dance; use
of a head scratcher; and abstention from meat, often with other dietary restric-
tions. All of these authors also emphasize variability within and between regions.
They compare specific data on the events and accouterments of puberty rites to
suggest possible historic relationships among tribes. Among other features noted
in at least some groups are seclusion, usually seclusion to a special structure; use
of designated objects, such as food and water containers; instruction from older
women about morals and behavior; body molding (older women massage or
knead the girl’s body to make her strong and straight); running or racing; prepar-
ing special foods for family members; craft activities that demonstrate skills val-
ued as women’s work; obtaining spirit helpers; exercises where the girl lies in a
pit with hot rocks, on warm sand, or in a trench that she digs herself; and storing
food in baskets or buried in pits where trails cross. Making rock art during
puberty observances is noted only on the Columbia Plateau and in southern Cali-
fornia. Comparative studies conclude not that puberty rites are universal, nor that
any particular combination of features is universal, but that a constellation of
puberty rite attributes is frequent enough in western North America to suggest
very ancient roots and ideological connections with hunting and fishing econo-
mies. Furthermore, rites differ enough to suggest that over time, different tribes
made innovations and modified their practices to produce a great deal of variation
in the features and duration of the puberty ceremony or training period.
In contrast to the anthropological tradition of historical particularism, other
scholars compared cultures to discover what humans the world over have in com-
mon. Van Gennep defined the term “rite of passage” in 1906 and identified three
HZ CHAPTER 6

stages he thought were common to all such rituals, everywhere in the world: sepa-
ration, transition, and incorporation. This proposition has enjoyed remarkable
longevity and has accrued additional general propositions, such as Victor Turner's
identification of “liminal states” in rites of passage. In The Hunting Peoples, Carleton
Coon, following van Gennep, defines rites of passage as “the rituals that peoples
of all cultures, including hunters, perform to ease the transition from one state,
biological, social, or both, to another.” Coon notes that “Only in puberty rites,
in illnesses followed by recovery, and sometimes in a marriage do all three steps
apply to the protagonist” (Coon 1971, 308).
Coon distinguishes girls’ and boys’ rites. For boys, puberty is more gradual,
so they can be initiated in groups, he asserts. For groups of boys, rites of passage
can be made to coincide with a rite of intensification. These rituals maintain or
restore order. They can be calendrical, or they can follow a disaster or disruption.
In contrast, ‘with girls the first menstruation is a well-marked, dramatic event,
and girls are therefore more likely to be initiated one at a time’ (Coon 1971,
309). As groups grow in size and complexity, they have to start initiating girls in
groups as well as boys, or they scale back the girls’ ceremonies so that only imme-
diate family members take part in the observance. This generalization provokes
the particularists among us to ask if all cultures attribute the same meaning to
first menses. Do all cultures agree that first menses is unassailable evidence that a
puberty ceremony must be performed immediately? Do no cultures recognize spe--
cific events as evidence that a boy has reached puberty, such as onset of voice
change? Is the concept of puberty the same everywhere, and is the three-stage
model of puberty rites really universal?
Because rock art is sometimes produced in the context of puberty rites—and
because rock art is less ephemeral than many of the other accouterments of
puberty rites, such as ground paintings and seclusion structures—detailed investi-
gation of puberty-associated rock art production in the American West should
help address some of these questions and also shed light on the historical relation-
ships proposed by Kroeber, Driver, and Jorgensen.

USING ETHNOGRAPHIES _ Few anthropologists interviewed Native Amert-

cans about the meanings and purposes of rock art; James Teit and Alfred Kroeber
are two who did. Julian Steward wrote a small monograph on California rock art
in 1929 and clearly took pains to justify his effort by arguing that rock art had
meaning to those who made it, contrary to the opinion of most of his peers that
rock art was mere doodling. Steward writes: “We can probably never know pre-
cisely why many of the petroglyphs and pictographs were made. But we can guess
that many of them were made for some religious or ceremonial purpose.” He cites
 LIFE CYCLES AND PUBERTY RITES 1)

examples of rock art made during boys’ and girls’ puberty ceremonies on the
Columbia Plateau and in southern California, and concludes that “These facts do
not of course prove that all petroglyphs were made during puberty ceremonies.
But it does strongly suggest that most if not all were undoubtedly more than the
result of idle moments, even of efforts to produce works of art” (Steward 1929,
225). Steward specifically links particular southern California painting styles with
Luisefio and Cupefio puberty rites, as based on eyewitness accounts (Steward
1929-227).
Likewise, Heizer and Baumhoff (1962) discuss rock art and puberty rites in
the context of “ethnic identification” in their volume on rock art in Nevada and
neighboring states. Most archaeologists at that time still dismissed rock art as
meaningless (and undatable), despite Steward’s protests to the contrary. Heizer
and Baumhoff explain to their readers that, although native people disavow
knowledge of who made rock engravings, “With regard to painted pictographs,
however, there is clear ethnographic evidence of use and authorship. Pictographs
were evidently used for a least two distinct purposes by some aboriginal Califor-
nia tribes. Among the Luisefio of the southern California coast pictographs were
painted as a part of the girls’ puberty ceremony.” In addition, shamans made
paintings in the San Joaquin valley and the Sierra Nevada. But having established
that rock art was made by Native Americans and that it was the result of mean-
ingful, patterned, ritually important behavior, the authors have made their point.
They fail, however, to make further use of ethnography, and they do not address
the cultural contexts of rock art nor the ritual practices mentioned. Instead, most
of their rock art research focuses on defining stylistic zones.
In contrast, D. L. True (1954) and Emma Lou Davis (1961) link specific
rock art sites and ethnographically attested puberty rites. True cites numerous
ethnographies to show that red paintings along the San Luis Rey River not only
match historic accounts of paintings done by girls at the end of their puberty
ceremonies but that the paintings correlate well with the locations of known Lui-
sefio villages. True argues that the distinctive selection of design elements and the
way they are combined and executed “cause the designs of this region to stand
out in a comparative study.” Notably, True here establishes a detailed set of crite-
ria for recognizing Luisefio rock paintings that were made in the context of
puberty rites. He does not attempt to explain any other rock art by analogy.
Davis identifies vulva-shaped petroglyphs near the summit of one of the
Mono Craters in the Inyo National Forest of California (figure 6.1). She
describes the petroglyphs and their landscape context in detail, and she notes that
formally similar figures are found in the deserts east of Los Angeles and near
Joshua Tree National Park. Next, Davis turns to ethnography to find similarities.
114 CHAPTER 6

Fig. 6.1 A group of the Mono Crater petroglyphs. Photo by Robert Mark (scale in centimeters).

Portable stone objects with the same “horseshoe” shape were used in Dieguefio
(Kumeyaay) girls’ initiation rites to “protect the initiates from evil forces and to
ensure safe and easy childbirth.” Although the historic Dieguefio lived three hun-
dred miles from the Mono Craters, girls’ initiation ceremonies were widespread
in southern California; so “a similar use of the Mono Craters female symbols is
a possibility which will bear further investigation for more local parallels.” Davis
explicitly identifies two weaknesses in her chain ofinference: the distance between
the site and the nearest ethnographically attested use of a similar icon; and the
difficulty of proving that the petroglyphs represented vulvas at all, even though
some are “very realistic.” Rather than claiming she has “explained” this site, she
argues that:

there are reasonable bases for suggesting that the Mono Craters petro-
glyphs are representations of female genitalia with magical and ceremo-
nial associations: I) They occur in a non-utilitarian setting. 2) The
more naturalistic obviously resemble vulvas . . . 3) The wide gradations
of versions make it clear that the abstract specimens are similar repre-
sentations. 4) There is archaeological evidence that the same motif was
widespread in the deserts of Southern California. 5) There is ethno-
 LIFE CYCLES AND PUBERTY RITES EUS

graphic evidence that at least at times the symbol was used in several
ways in connection with the initiations of young girls. The effigies
actually represented the female organ and were believed to be an insur-
ance against harm and efficacious in promoting safe and easy child-
birth. (Davis 1961, 238-39)

Each of these authors, True and Davis, begins with a specific rock art site, or
sites, within a region and attempts to draw connections with specific Native
American traditions. The rock art has research value and other meanings to peo-
ple today because it was made and used in meaningful cultural contexts. Most
professional archaeologists today would agree that the degree to which we can
understand the meaning of rock art correlates strongly with the availability of
relevant ethnographic records. Many rock art researchers trained in art history,
psychology, and other fields, as well as in archaeology, operate under other
assumptions.

APPEALS TO HUMAN UNIVERSALS As in the case of “fertility shrines”

(chapter 4), puberty rites attract seekers of human universals. For this section of
the chapter, I focus on one particular paper that epitomizes the generalizing tradi-
tion’s approach to this topic in the Far West. In a paper presented at a rock art
symposium in San Diego and published by the San Diego Museum of Man in
1986, archaeologists Jack Steinbring and Gary Granzberg discuss rock art and
puberty rites in a paper entitled “Ideological and Cosmological Inferences from
North American Rock Art: An Exploratory Discussion.” The audience consisted
of professional and avocational archaeologists and rock art enthusiasts who pre-
sumably all had prior interest in rock art studies. The authors note that two schol-
ars, ethnographer James Teit (1900, 32) and archaeologist D. L. True (1954),
have “clearly demonstrated that rock art is sometimes associated with puberty
rituals.” Further consideration of this topic, they argue, “would be useful in light
of the fusion it brings between the psychological, the philosophical, and the cul-
tural.” Steinbring and Granzberg’s goal is to achieve such an interpretive fusion,
not to explain the meanings of particular rock art sites.
Citing Carlton Coon (1971), Steinbring and Granzberg argue that puberty
rites of some kind are universal (though perhaps “widespread” would be more
accurate). Puberty is power connected; guardian spirit quests are often associated
with puberty, at least in North America; and rock art is viewed by many native
North Americans as powerful and spiritual, whether made in the context of
puberty rites, vision quests, or other contexts. They then note that initiates some-
1ié CHAPTER YG

times “commemorate the event by making a mark upon the rocks” (Steinbring
and Granzberg 1986, 109).
In the space of one page, the authors move from a few specific cases of rock
art made during puberty in western North America to generalizations about
North American rock art and religion. In the following pages, they drift blissfully
outward to a universal scale, arguing that:

There is one universal factor in any rite de passage that can be translated
into recurrent forms of graphic representation. These rites themselves
always symbolize the end of something and at the same time the begin-
ning of something else. . . . Our task now is to suggest leads which
might help in the analysis and interpretation of rock art potentially
linked to these phenomena. . . . Edges are the end of something and the
beginning of something else. (Steinbring and Granzberg 1986, 209)

Steinbring and Granzberg next leap nimbly across the Rocky Mountains from
the Northwest to the Southwest to describe “lateral abrasions or peckings across
natural edges” that cannot be explained as depictions of anything, nor as traces
of sharpening or grinding activities. “Hypothetically, it is suggested here that
these may, given other variables, represent the ritual act of marking the passage.
The act itself is conditioned by the mystical boundary represented by the edge”
(Steinbring and Granzberg 1986, 209). They then note frequent occurrences of
edge abrasion near the openings of rock shelters that could have been used “for
the isolation of youngsters.” The authors continue in this speculative vein by not-
ing that if no natural edges were available for those compelled to mark edges,
then “the edge itself can be symbolized” by making a line and by drawing across
that, suggesting “a possible reinterpretation for some of the numerous centipede-
like forms” in rock art of many regions. These figures may be both centipedes
and boundary marks, and some may be both boundary marks and “tree of life”
symbols. The tree of life is, the authors argue, a universal symbol associated with
growth and development, the searching for a lost paradise, and seeking “transcen-
dence and change of essence”; and the tree is a common symbol of initiation.
Compare Steinbring and Granzberg’s use of possible connections between
rock art and initiation/ puberty rites with those of True and Davis. Steinbring
and Granzberg present a chain of inference whose links are based on identifying
certain figures and ascribing meanings to them on the basis that associations
between particular shapes and meanings are ‘‘very frequent,” “common,” or even
universal. Ethnographic cases are only important here as examples of such associa-
tions, and they do not link specific peoples to specific rock art sites. The goal
 LIFE CYCLES AND PUBERTY RITES LL

here is not to understand how and why people of specific age and ethnic groups
used rock art so we can learn more about their lifeways; the goal is to use rock art
to reinforce preexisting ideas about what all humans have in common, especially a
striving for spiritual growth. In this approach, systematic recording, landscape
context, distance between sites and people practicing historically attested rituals,
and positive identification of figures and their ranges of variation have little
importance. Focus is on a vague and general message (“every human strives for
spiritual growth’’), not the medium, nor the context.
What happens when we examine the medium—that is, specific rock art imag-
ery—in its cultural context? Far from proving universal, the making of records
by puberty initiates in the West is limited to a few historical traditions, and mak-
ing rock art is attested for only two areas: the Columbia Plateau and Southern
California. In the Southwest, images of the initiates themselves appear in rock art
(chapter 7), but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest they were made by the
initiates. And what is the message? Is it the same in all three areas? In each of the
following sections and subsequent chapters, I explore one or two case studies
of rock art and puberty rites from each of these geographic areas and historical
traditions.
Puberty Rites and Rock Art on the Columbia Plateau As ethnographers under the
direction of Franz Boas scoured the Northwest for details about the lives of rap-
idly disappearing (or so they thought) Native peoples, a few noted rock engrav-
ings and paintings. In many Plateau tribes, shamans, or “doctors,” recorded their
dreams on the rocks; girls and boys made paintings at the end of their “training”;
and rock art sites were often sought out as powerful places to undergo vision
quests. Rock art as part of girls puberty rites (and usually those of boys as well)
has been reported for the ‘Nlaka’pamux (Thompson), Stl’atl’imx, Okanagon,
Shuswap, and Lillooet groups of British Columbia, as well as the Quinault of
Puget Sound. Puberty initiates on the Modoc Plateau probably also made rock
art (Whitley, Loubser, and Hann in press). In addition, boys of the Lower
Columbia River tribes, such as the Yakama, made petroglyphs during their vision
quests, and Coeur d’Alene boys made paintings. Kutenai, Flathead, Pend d’Ore-
ille, and Spokan people used rock art sites for vision quests, and some reportedly
made images of their dreams and spirit helpers in historic times.
Making and interpreting rock art on the Columbia Plateau is best recorded
for the ‘Nlaka’pamux (Thompson), as a result of the work of anthropologist
James Teit. For this section, I focus on two studies that incorporate his work in
very different approaches to studying rock art. Teit studied Inland Salish cultures
on the northern Columbia Plateau of British Columbia and described rock paint-
ings made “in lonely and secluded places near where Indians were in the habit of
13 ICHAP TER 6

holding vigil and undergoing training during the period of their puberty ceremon-
ies when they generally acquired their manitous [spirit helpers] (Teit 1918). At
the end of a ‘Nlaka’pamux woman’s seclusion, Teit notes “all the activities she
performed while secluded were to be recorded on a boulder” (Teit 1900, 227).
She had to make miniatures of “every article which women were in the habit of
making,” including baskets, mats, rope, and thread (Teit 1900, 313). Girls used
fir boughs as beds in their seclusion structures, washed themselves with fir boughs,
plucked and counted fir needles, and apparently dreamed to receive the red fir as
an important spirit helper (Teit 1906, for the Lillooet; Hill-Tout 1978, 112; see
also Whitley 2000, 96-97). Therefore, some girls’ paintings might be identified
by the presence of depictions of fir boughs and of human figures inside “rayed
arc’’ shapes that might represent seclusion structures (Corner 1968, 53, II];
Keyser 1992, 57-59; figure 6.2).
Teit also notes that paintings could be made by anyone, not just those in
puberty training, who sought supernatural protection—for instance, those who
wanted to record a striking dream, to mark and protect camps and trails, or to
record prophecy or a historical event. Teit’s work C1896, 7E39SnT900NTORS,
1930) provides the basis for most subsequent archaeological interpretation of
rock art in interior British Columbia.

ON
tee

v ER
ai oN ee iy 4
wv
Fig. 6.2 Columbia Plateau paintings associated with girls’ vision quest. Drawing by Kelley Hays-
Gilpin, after Corner (1968).
 LIFE CYCLES AND PUBERTY RITES 119

Gina Marucci recently embarked on an ethnographically based survey of

women’s rituals including puberty rites in interior British Columbia to facilitate
the archaeological recognition and study of women’s ritual use areas (Marucci
1999). Marucct focuses on northern Athabaskan groups, but she also includes
Inland Salish Shuswap and ‘Nlaka’pamux data. Ethnographies provide informa-
tion about many ritual practices that might leave traces in the archaeological
record. In addition to rock art, archaeologists might be able to recognize seclusion
structures; evidence for practice of food taboos; the trenches ‘Nlaka’ pamux girls
sometimes dug during their seclusion; their making baskets and other crafts; and
their harvesting bark, cambium, sap, and needles from trees. Marucci’s literature
search about pictographs reveals that tally marks were made to record the neces-
saty steps in a particular ritual, and it identifies figures that represent activities
undertaking by girls in puberty seclusion, such as basket weaving and counting fir
needles. She suggests that “where a high density of these pictographs occur, seclu-
sion sites may be in close proximity” (1999, 78).
The intent of Marucci’s study is not so much to explain the archaeological
record of inland British Columbia but to use this record as a strong case study in
the archaeology of gender. Rites of passage often play important roles in the
archaeology of gender because these rituals both express and create gender differ-
ence. Marucci writes:

Rites of womanhood must be understood not as isolated, singular

events, but as part of a larger belief system which was connected to
everyday life. In the past these rites were connected to rank, economy,
divisions of labor, kinship, gendered conceptualizations of land, and
cosmology. (1999, 76)

The difficulty, of course, is recognizing patterns in the archaeological record

that we can link with historically attested practices and worldviews, so other lines
of evidence and other ways of thinking must be brought into play. Marucct dem-
onstrates the importance of systematically investigating multiple lines of evidence,
including (but not limited to) rock art, in making the important effort to explore
women’s rituals and rites of passage in the past.
In They Write Their Dreams on the Rocks Forever, Annie Zetco York (a ‘Nlaka’pa-
mux elder), anthropologist Richard Daly, and artist Chris Arnett (1993) explain
why the greatest concentration of Inland Salish rock art in British Columbia
appears in the valley of the Stein River, a tributary of the Fraser. People of several
distinct Salish-speaking tribes used this particular locality for vision quests. The
presence of rock paintings enhanced the spiritual qualities of the location, attract-
120 GEIAPATERS <6

ing individuals there, rather than to other places, for vision quests. Paintings were
often made at the end of a vision quest, not only recording an individual's expert-
ence, but adding to the sacredness of the area in general. Art and spirituality have
a recursive relationship in this region.
York’s narratives juxtapose a deep, mythological past against traditional life-
ways and recent changes brought about by the arrrval of European settlers and
scientists, Chinese miners, and displaced persons from other First Nations. York
describes traditional puberty training:

In the morning an old man preaches the young people what to do. It’s
to go up in those mountains like that Stein. They spend their life there
and God is going to help them, to give them strength. The Indians
claimed that place because, for thousands of years, that was just like a
university to them.
They go up there [in the mountains] and they sleep, and this dream
tells them. Then he writes his dream on the rock. That’s left there
forever. (xv)
Yeah, that Stein, that’s a university. It’s this way you see. Okay,
you're young, and when you're about ten, or fourteen or fifteen, your
grandfather worries about you—if you're a boy. Or your grandmother
if you're a girl. He doesn’t like you to be an ordinary person because,
when you grow up to be a man, you going to be hunter, a fisherman, a
doctor. So they have to go up to the hills to learn aaaaaall |sic] the
different animals, their ways. And they have to go up to that Stein. (3)

York explains that red symbolizes good things, so anyone making a painting
prepares red ochre paint. Although Teit’s ethnographies refer to puberty ceremon-
ies, York’s recollections suggest not one event but a process of training lasting
several years, including formal instruction from relatives and solitary instruction
by supernatural beings. Paintings were done near the end of this process, and the
novices paint the visions they see in dreams, usually stories about ancient immor-
tal beings, hunting techniques revealed by spirit helpers, the spirit helpers them-
selves, or animals they wish to kill. York interprets many figures as records of
how long the individual fasted, what the weather was like, and the time of day
the painting was made by depicting the position of the sun. None of these figures
are necessarily specific to the training process, and different youths sought and
obtained different kinds of training. A wide variety of figures should therefore be
expected in rock art that might have been made in that context. While most
boys trained and dreamed to become hunters, some specialized in doctoring. Girls
dreamed about herbal medicine, basket making, and traditional stories.
 LIFE CYCLES AND PUBERTY RITES 12]

In summary, Columbia Plateau puberty rites are individually focused; they

include vision quests; they are usually done by both sexes; and they are part of a
longer process of “training” that focuses on skills that a man or woman should
have. Vision questing isn’t limited to initiates. Hunters, doctors, and herbalists of
both sexes continued to seek visions and spirit helpers throughout their lives, and
many continued to “paint their dreams” on the rocks. Rock art produced by
initiates was likely to have been quite varied and might or might not be distin-
guishable from that made for other purposes. Rock art depicting activities under-
taken during women’s puberty ceremonies, such as basket weaving and fir needle
stripping, might be distinguishable.
Puberty Rites and Rock Art in Southern California Kroeber, Driver, and Jorgensen
all conclude that Southern California puberty rites constitute a different historical
tradition from those of the Columbia Plateau, although they probably have an
ancient common root. At least some rock-art was certainly made by male and
female initiates among the Takic-speaking Luisefio, Cupefio, Cahuilla, and possi-
bly the Serrano. Initiates of Yuman-speaking tribes probably made petroglyphs in
California and Baja California, but little is known about them thus far. Most of
the rock art literature focuses on the Luisefio puberty ceremony for girls, and the
ceremony provides an interpretive model used throughout the Californias.
In contrast to the individual vision quests and training periods for Plateau
youths of both sexes, several Southern California tribes performed elaborate
group ceremonies for puberty initiates. In his survey of Western rock art, Steward
(1929, 227) writes:

Among the Luisefio the girls went through an elaborate ceremony at

puberty. This consisted in placing the girls in a pit with heated rocks
for three days. On the morning of the fourth day they left the pit and
their faces were painted black for a month. For the second month verti-
cal white lines were painted on their faces, and for the third month,
wavy, red horizontal lines. The last was called the “rattlesnake” design.
After further ceremonies in which a ground painting was used the girls
had a race to a certain rock. Here relatives of the girls stood to give
them red paint when they arrived, and they painted diamond-shaped
designs, representing the rattlesnake, on the rock. Among the Cuperio
the ceremony was much the same. The girls spent a period in a pit,
went through ceremonials in which a ground painting was the central
feature, and finally raced to a rock where they painted rectilinear
designs with red iron oxide.
122 CHAPTER 6

In comparing the Luisefio ceremony with other tribes, Kroeber emphasizes

that the “roasting” is a distinct feature of Southern California puberty rites. Spon-
sorship of the ceremony by members of another village or clan was apparently
limited to the Luisefio, who used the rite to forge interdependent and comple-
mentary relationships between social groups. Several girls took part at once, even
if only one was actually having her first menses at the time. Kroeber also notes
that the initiates swallowed tobacco, had their heads covered with a basket while
they were secluded, and used haliotis shell scratchers. A ground painting was
made at the end of the seclusion, and one was made prior to the race and prior
to the painting described above. Kroeber states that in some accounts the girls
made the paintings, and in others “the chief’s wife” made the paintings for them.
Girls deposited their hair ornaments at the rock, and at some point in the cere-
mony, their faces were tattooed (Kroeber 1925, 673-75).
Rock art researchers frequently cite Steward, Kroeber, and other ethnogra-
phers to suggest that red paintings might have been made during similar puberty
rites in southern California sites such as Ramona’s Cave in Riverside County
(Cahuilla territory; Quinn 1981, 122) and others in Riverside and San Bernar-
dino counties (Serrano territory; Vuncannon 1977; see figure 6.3). What records
we do have of Serrano girls’ puberty rites include strong parallels with the prac-
tices of their Luisefio relatives and neighbors, including “roasting” the girls in a
pit full of heated sand, covering their heads with baskets, using a scratcher, and
painting their faces; but if this seclusion was followed by racing and rock painting,
it has not been recorded. If painting red diamond chains was once part of Serrano
girls’ puberty rites, rock art studies potentially may augment our incomplete
understanding of Serrano history.
Recently, David Whitley (1994b, 1998, 2000) has reexamined southern Cal-
ifornia ethnography and rock art to expand our understanding of the worldviews
and cosmologies that shape puberty rites and other aspects of the Takic-speaking
peoples’ cultures. He draws not on human symbolic universals but on neuropsy-
chology and common visual patterns produced by human brains in altered states
of consciousness (cf. Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1988). Whitley searches for
patterns within the data, focusing especially on structural oppositions and one
universal feature of human cognition: the neurologically determined body of
visual images, bodily sensations, and emotions
experienced in altered states of
consciousness (ASCs). When it comes to interpreting specific rock art sites
known to have been produced by puberty initiates, however, he relies not on
universals at all but on specific ethnohistoric information about cultural practices
and cosmologies. Instead of simply noting that Luisefio girls made paintings of
rattlesnakes in their puberty ceremonies, Whitley places this activity in the con-
 LIFE CYCLES AND PUBERTY RITES 1208

oyI RXR
ROY

SN) hod

Fig. 6.3 Diamond chain paintings in southern California (drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin, after
drawing by Delcie Vuncannon 1977, fig. 1).

text of the overall Takic model of the cosmos, which is based on gender dualism
and the need for mortal humans to practice gender inversions in their interaction
with spiritual realms. Rattlesnakes are a powerful masculine symbol invoked as
the best possible helping spirit for young women. Likewise, male initiates of the
jimsonweed cult were instructed to produce pictographs of abstract circular and
curvilinear motifs that Takic speakers associate with feminine power.
In the Takic tradition, the caves and other rock openings that allow shamans
to enter in search of spirit helpers are powerful feminine spaces used by male
ritual practitioners (Whitley 1998, 2000). Association between shamanism and
masculine sexuality is not assumed by Whitley, but documented with specific
linguistic and ethnohistoric data (see also Whitley 1994a). Whitley argues that
puberty ceremonies in many Western tribes include experiencing ASCs. While
initial entoptic imagery and sensations experienced in the initial stages of ASCs
are universal, he takes care to explain that what an individual makes of all this ts
shaped by culturally determined expectations and ways of thinking.
124 CHAPTER 6

Comparing the Columbia Plateau and Southern California Puberty Rock Art The con-
trast between Plateau and southern California puberty experiences is marked. On
the Plateau, a girl may paint anything she sees in her dream and any of the activi-
ties she has undertaken during her seclusion. These often have to do with
expected feminine labor, such as basket weaving, and with preferred feminine
spirit helpers, such as the red fir tree. In southern California, a girl paints rattle-
snake designs. Her choice of helping spirits is likewise limited to the rattlesnake
because of an ideology of gender inversions. The rattlesnake, a masculine image,
is the most beneficial helping spirit for girls (Whitley 1994b, 83). Following
initiation, women put rattlesnake designs in basketry and on female infants’ cradle
boards. Although not necessarily depreted in their rock art, female grizzly bears
may have been the helpers most desired by male shamans, so a complementary
gender inversion may have been available to boys as well.
The gendered symbolism of helping spirits (and of the landscape in which
the rock art is situated, as discussed in chapter 8) escaped Kroeber, but he does
note as unusual (for California) the “partial assimilation” of the boys’ toloache
(jimsonweed society) initiation with the girls’ adolescence ceremony among the
Luisefio: ground paintings are made for both; both receive similar training or
“advice”; and both undergo similar restrictions. He writes that the Luisefio “hav-
ing more nearly equated the ceremony with that for boys, make of it almost an
initiation into a cult, with sermons over the sand painting, an ordeal of retaining
swallowed tobacco, foot racing, and painting of rocks by the candidate” (Kroeber
1925, 716). Whitley adds that they both stress entering an ASC to obtain spirit
helpers of the opposite gender. While boys used the more powerful and danger-
ous jimsonweed, the balls of tobacco and “pills” of sage and salt could have pro-
duced an ASC for a girl, especially if taken together with isolation in a pit full of
hot rocks, dietary restrictions, dancing, running, and other practices.

Puberty and Fertility

Pioneer rock art researcher Robert Heizer observed that when we look to ethnog-
raphy to help explain rock art in the West, we often find that it has something to
do with female fertility. Decades later, with more systematic investigation of both
ethnography and rock art, we find that his suggestion doesn’t help much. We now
have many ethnographic accounts of making rock art that doesn’t have to do with
female fertility—that is, dreams and visions and spirit helpers of all kinds, includ-
ing those who help with weather control, doctoring, and hunting. Rock art was
made and used by men as well as women, in puberty rites and for other purposes.
Heizer himself differentiated southern California’s rattlesnake paintings made by
 LIFE CYCLES AND PUBERTY RITES 125

groups of young women at their puberty ceremonies from the cup-and-groove

“baby rocks” of northern California, made by individual women or couples seek-
ing pregnancy. It is now possible, and necessary, to distinguish among tribes who
used rock art in puberty ceremonies.
The commonality in Heizer’s examples is not female fertility but the vision
quest and acquisition of helping spirits. What is perhaps most interesting is that
while most Western tribes stressed vision quests, not very many made rock art.
More careful and complete use of available ethnography suggests that the reason
Luisefo girls made rock art in their puberty ceremony was to publicly demon-
strate that they had successfully acquired the most culturally appropriate helping
spirit, the rattlesnake. The reason Plateau girls made rock art was to record not
only the helping spirits they received in dreams, but also to make a record of their
activities during seclusion, including making baskets, plucking fir needles, and
sleeping in a hut of fir boughs. The function of the act of painting one’s vision
in this region seems to be to intensify the power of the connection between the
seeker and the spirit. Teit writes that rock paintings of the Salish tribes were
“supposed to transmit power from the object desired to the person making the
picture” (1930, 194), “supposed to hasten the attainment of a person’s manitou
or other desires” (1909, 590), or “render such powers they had attained stronger
and more permanent” (1918). Likewise, recording activities in this way may have
been meant to intensify or prolong a girl’s expertise in a particular activity. The
reason Pomo women made cup-and-groove petroglyphs was to contact helpful
spirit beings in certain rocks, who could then send the spirits of babies to pro-
spective parents, effecting pregnancy by spiritual means (Parkman 1997; Whitley
2000, 48, 98-101). In summary, rock art is related to the vision quest, but the
instrumental reasons for including rock art in puberty and fertility rituals in the
Far West vary.
Rather than using rock art to attribute sites to specific cultures, or using eth-
nography to explain rock art, Whitley’s goal is to use both to explore human
cognition and belief systems. He finds that the most interesting “substrate,” or
ancient commonality, among tribes in western North America ts not that all have
a gitls’ puberty ceremony (per Kroeber, Driver, and Jorgensen) but that all place
prime emphasis on the vision quest, spirit helpers, and shamanistic practices. The
form of the puberty ceremony depends on the particular emphasis a group places
on obtaining spirit helpers. For the aforementioned Columbia Plateau tribes, an
individual of either sex goes to remote location alone and may dream of any
number of helping spirits. In the larger, more densely populated Luisefio villages,
however, initiation is a more public matter, taking place in and near the village;
and obtaining helping spirits 1s guided not only by elders of an opposite clan or
126 CHAPTER 6

village but by gender inversions. Lest the reader fear that I am substituting one
human universal (ASCs) for another (van Gennep’s tripartite puberty rite) or that
I am conflating universal cognitive processes that inform behavior with universal
behaviors themselves, I turn in the next chapter to the Pueblos of the Southwest,
where yet a third pattern of female puberty rite appears, and ASCs do little or
nothing to explain puberty-related imagery in rock art.
“Maidens” and Flute Players in the of
Southwest

F ROCK ART OFTEN ts involved in rites of passage and the social construction
of gender identities, as the previous chapter claims, can rock art tell us any-
thing about the history of such practices? Puebloan people of Arizona and
New Mexico have similar architecture, subsistence techniques, and religious prac-
tices; so anthropologists have grouped them in a single culture area with two
subareas: one for Eastern Pueblos, including Eastern Keresan and Tanoan speak-
ers; and one for Western Pueblos, including Hopi, Zuni, and Western Keresan
speakers (Eggan 1950; Ware and Blinman 2000). All have traditional histories
describing an emergence place, where members split up into small social groups
that migrated in many directions for many generations and then regrouped in a
“middle place.”
The Pueblos have endured a great deal of anthropological attention to pat-
terned differences in subsistence and kinship arrangements: eastern irrigation
farmers versus western dry farmers; eastern patrilineal /bilateral organizations and
western matrilineal systems; and various pottery-making traditions. Rock art
studies thus far have concentrated on stylistic classification, chronology, and cer-
tain classes of imagery, such as katsina figures, flute players, and various birds and
animals. My own work on Puebloan rock art has focused on sex and gender, but
in consulting with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, a branch of the Hopi
tribal government, I have realized that the primary goal of rock art research for
Hopi people is using imagery to help verify and supplement traditional clan his-
tories, to demonstrate the continuity and antiquity of Hopi ancestors’ occupation
of the southwestern United States, and to explore their connections with Eastern
Pueblos, Mesoamerica, and other regions. Depictions of sexed personages in rock
art have turned out to be a good place to start.

Studying Pueblo Puberty

We have no ethnographic evidence that initiates made rock art as part of puberty
rituals, but we do have depictions in rock art that appear to represent pubescent

127
128 CHAPTER 7

women. Hopi and Zunt consultants familiar with traditional iconography consis-
tently identify these as “maidens.” The most salient feature, or key symbol, of
female puberty among the Pueblos is “butterfly hair whorls,” a particular hairstyle
assumed after completing a short puberty observance and worn on ceremonial
occasions until marriage (figure 7.1).
Images of butterfly hair whorls appear in rock art as early as A.p. 200 (figure
7.2) and in painted pottery (figure 7.3) from at least the a.p. 600s through his-
toric times, in protohistoric kiva murals of the fifteenth century and later (Smith
1952; Hibben 1975), on contemporary kachina dolls and sculptures, and in kat-
sina performances. (Per advice from my Hopi teachers, I use the familiar English
spelling “kachina” to refer to dolls, but the Hopi spelling “katsina’” to refer to
spiritual personages and their depictions in other media. )

Rem
Fig. 7.1 Hopi woman dressing hair of unmarried girl. Note U-shaped wooden stick in partly
shaped hair whorl. Photo by Henry Peabody (ca. 1900). National Archives and Record
Administration catalog number 79-HPS-6-3274.
 “MAIDENS” AND FLUTE PLAYERS 129

g. h.

Fig. 7.2 Figures with hair whorls in rock art from various localities. Date unknown unless
specified; all petroglyphs unless specified: a, Arizona strip north of Grand Canyon; b, Morris Cave
4, Prayer Rock District, white paint, Basketmaker III period (ca. A.D. 600s); c, Petroglyph National
Monument, near Albuquerque, on basalt, Pueblo IV period (ca. 4.0. 1300-1700); d, Baird’s
Chevelon Steps site, near Winslow, Arizona, Pueblo IV period (ca. 4.0. 1300s); e, near Holbrook,
Arizona; f, near Winslow, Arizona; g, near Seligman, Arizona; h, near Payson, Arizona; i, near
Cibecue, Arizona, black paint. Drawings and photo enhancements by Kelley Hays-Gilpin.
130 (GEAR RE

Fig. 7.3 Figures with hair whorls on pottery: a, La Plata black-on-white, Basketmaker III period,
near Durango, Colorado (after Lister and Lister 1978, 11); b, White Mound black-on-white bowl
sherd from NA 8939, Pithouse 3, near Houck, Arizona (associated tree-ring dates range from a.D.
785 to 837); c, La Plata black-on-white, Basketmaker III period, near Durango, Colorado (after
Lister and Lister 1978, 11); d, Pueblo | period black-on-white pitcher, La Plata District (after
Morris 1939, pl. 2241); e, Jeddito black-on-yellow ladle base, Homol’ovi area, near Winslow,
Arizona, Pueblo IV period (ca. A.0. 1350-1400; Arizona State Museum); f, figure from Jeddito
engraved bowl, late Pueblo IV period (ca. 4.0. 1450-1700), Awatovi, Hopi Mesas (Harvard
Peabody Museum, Awatovi Expedition catalog number 5361). Drawings by Kelley Hays-Gilpin.
 “MAIDENS” AND FLUTE PLAYERS [3]

If the Pueblo puberty rite is short and relatively undemanding, at least com-
pared to that of their Far Western neighbors discussed in the previous chapter,
why is the image of the pubescent woman so widespread, pervasive, and long-
lived? In this chapter, I attempt a practical application of the argument that study-
ing rock art with gender in mind does not just provide attractive illustrations for
a story we already know; rather, studying rock art provides historical evidence to
actually add new chapters.
Joseph Jorgensen (1980), whose comparative studies were outlined in the pre-
vious chapter, attributes the relatively low visibility of Pueblo puberty rites to
differing cultural—historical trajectories and to different economic bases. Far
Western girls’ puberty rites show a strong concern with adverse effects of men-
struating women on hunting and fishing. The Pueblos are resolute agriculturalists,
he notes, and Pueblo women observe no menstrual taboos. Unlike their north-
western neighbors, Pueblos have few taboos concerning menstrual blood, and
pubescent women are not considered dangerous or polluting. They are, however,
extremely important symbolically. They represent the growing maize plants and
other aspects of fertility and abundance (Black 1984). As future lineage heads
and clan mothers, “maidens” are in training to take on important social and ritual
roles. Careful attention to rock art, pottery, and kiva murals shows they have been
depicted continuously for at least eighteen hundred years.

Coming of Age in the Pueblos

In most of the Pueblos, a girl’s female relatives marked her first menses by setting
her to grind corn for four days, then putting her hair up in two whorls on the
sides of her head (figure 7.1). At Hopi, these are called poli’ini. The verb form,
poli’inta, means “wearing a butterfly” (Hopi Dictionary Project 1998, 421). Hopi
speakers, like most other speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages, associate butterflies
with summer, flowers, fertility, water, and a utopian, spiritual world (Hill and
Hays-Gilpin 1999).
The most elaborate puberty observances among the Pueblos took place in the
First Mesa Hopi village of Walpi. Alexander Stephen describes a Walpi puberty
observance in January, 1893:

For four days . . . Kii'yimana |“‘water-maiden,” who belongs to the

Patki, or “water-house,” clan| and, assisting at different times, nearly
all the other girls of Walpi, in the house of Sikya’nitimka of the Reed
clan who is Kii’yi’s father’s sister... . A rabbit skin rug is hung up to
conceal the grinding stones from the direct sunlight, which must not
oy), ACIS UMP IN EISe 7

touch Kii’yi during the four days, nor must she touch salt or flesh for
that time.
Her first menses have occurred and she is now qualifying herself to
have her hair dressed in large whorls called boliinta. It is in the evening
of this occurrence that the maiden goes to the house of her father’s
sister. What is done then I have not yet discovered. (Stephen 1936,
139-40)

The next morning, other girls who have already had their hair whorled join
Kii’yi to take turns grinding in the darkened room, and “matrons’’ (married
women) bring gifts of cornmeal. Her aunt’s husband or her grandfather brings a
head scratcher. “If the maid scratched her hair or body with her fingers during
these days of observance, her hair would fall out.” The girls “chatter and make
light sport of what appears to one a very tedious and laborious occupation.” Next,
the family calls a general feast for women friends. On the last morning, Kii’yi’s
aunt washes her hair and dresses it in the whorls, rubs her face with white corn-
meal, and takes her to a shrine with about eight other young girls, where they
deposit a basket of prayer meal and the head scratcher (Stephen 1936, 140—43).
In other Hopi villages, girls’ puberty rites were less elaborate or not as well
reported. In the Second Mesa village of Mishongnovi, Parsons reports, “At her
adolescence retreat the Mishongnovi girl is also kept in the shade; she fasts from
salt and meat; she is ‘like a baby’” (1939, 601); and “On Second Mesa the girls
go out with the hunters after an adolescence ceremony at which they have been
grinding” (1939, 25).
Helen Sekaquaptewa grew up in the Third Mesa village of Hotvela. She
writes, “A girl wears her hair long and loose until she is fourteen or fifteen years
old. After she menstruates, she puts her hair up in two whorls at each side of her
head... . I should say that her hair is put up for her” (1969, 118). She does not
mention undertaking a puberty seclusion, but she does describe ritual grinding in
the home of her future mother-in-law as part of the marriage ceremony several
years later: “As a bride I was considered sacred the first few days, being in a room
with the shades on the windows, talking to no one. All this time I was steadily
grinding corn which was brought in by Emory’s [her husband to be} kinswomen”
(1969) 1355),
In most other Pueblo villages, at first menstruation, girls grind corn to help
prepare for a family feast, and they have their hair put up. Darkened rooms and
food taboos may be specific to Hopi, and scratching sticks and offerings at
shrines may only appear at Walpi. This distinction may be due to sparse ethno-
graphic information about life-cycle events in the other Pueblos; or, as Jorgensen
 ”"MAIDENS” AND FLUTE PLAYERS 133

(1980) suggests, the First Mesa version of the puberty ceremony may have been
influenced by Athabaskan-speaking Navajo neighbors who retain the Far Western
tribes’ emphasis on elaborate female puberty rites and restrictions. The Navajo
arrived in Hopiland sometime in the 1700s and intermarried most frequently
with the First Mesa Hopis and the Eastern Pueblo people who often immigrated
to First Mesa. Likewise, Parsons notes that the Walp: puberty rite has some simi-
larities (food taboos, seclusion, scratching stick) to the practices of the California
tribes and the Paiute (the linguistic relatives of the Hopi), and not to the practices
of the other Pueblos (1939, 58). In any case, even within the Pueblo culture
area, ways of observing puberty vary, probably for historical reasons of frequent
immigration as well as social and ritual ties among different groups. Archaeolo-
gists working with both traditional histories and material evidence should be able
to make sense of some of this variation, a topic taken up again in chapter 9.
Van Gennep’s (1909/ 1960) three-stage ritual model of separation, transi-
tion, and incorporation applies to Puebloan observance of female puberty in that
the puberty rite marks a “transition” via a “liminal” state between “girl” and a
distinct social category, maana, often translated as “maiden,” that is complete in
itself. The initiate is separated socially from others, but unlike many Far Western
tribes, the separation phase in the Pueblos does not involve physical seclusion.
Even on First Mesa, the initial stage of the ritual involves only a short journey to
the home of an aunt of her father’s clan, where the girl is not always alone but
has company during the corn-grinding ordeal that may be said to constitute the
transition phase of the ritual. On completing “incorporation” via the family feast,
an individual holds the status of maana for several years, from puberty until the
beginning of her lengthy marriage ceremony, when she becomes a wuuti, a woman
(as Helen Sekaquaptewa notes, some aspects of the Hopi wedding suggest an
additional separation, transition, and incorporation sequence). In all the Hopi
villages, maidens appear as a group at public dances, and each becomes eligible
for initiation into one of three women’s ritual societies, usually the one her pater-
nal aunt has joined. The Marau, Lakon, and Oaqél societies closely parallel many
of the functions and practices of men’s sodalities and thus have similar initiations.
These initiations do not mark puberty; rather, puberty is a prerequisite.
Observance of puberty for any individual Pueblo girl is downplayed com-
pared to Far Western tribes, but the symbolic importance of young, marriageable
women in Pueblo religion and iconography is unparalleled. The key symbol of
maidenhood is the butterfly hair whorls. This hairstyle change is well described
for Hopi, Taos, and Zuni, and some version of hair whorls probably appeared in
the other pueblos as well. Taos girls “wore a braid down the back which was
changed after the first menstruation to the double cue |sic] arrangement” (Parsons
ie CLAr DER?

1936, 26). Zuni maidens wore hair whorls with a wooden frame left inside to
hold their butterfly shape, and they ground corn for one day in the home of
paternal relatives. Women wearing butterfly hair whorls appear in paintings on
pottery and kiva walls, in rock art, and on painted wooden ritual paraphernalia.
Many feminine katsinam (plural of katsina) wear butterfly hair whorls and at Hop
are called katsinmamant (katsina maidens). Only a few represent adult women, such
as Spider Grandmother and Hahay’iwuuti, the mother of the katsinam, who symbol-
izes ideal womanhood. At Hopi, maize plants are called “maidens” until they
become mothers by bearing mature ears (Black 1984), and Zuni and Keresan tales
include corn maidens who flee mistreatment, only to be recovered by a masculine
culture hero who lures them back with his flute playing.

Archaeological Evidence
Can studying prehistoric depictions of figures with butterfly hair whorls shed
light on the long-term history of Puebloan puberty practices and beliefs? What is
their distribution in space and time? Have hair whorls always indicated pubescent
females? Can their contexts and associations tell us anything about variations in
meaning accorded “maidenhood” in Pueblo cultures? Such figures appear often
in rock art (figure 7.2) and infrequently (but often enough to recognize their
continuing importance) on pottery and other media. Images on pottery (figure
7.3) are especially interesting because pottery styles have known date ranges and
known production areas. Depictions of “maidens” on pottery are most frequent
between about a.p. 600 and 900, and again between about a.p. 1350 and 1700..
Detailed study of human figures that have hair whorls, breasts, or genitals
depicted suggests that hair whorls frequently appear in rock art and pottery in
northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. To the south, they appear
just below the Mogollon Rim in the Payson and Grasshopper/Cibecue areas of
Arizona but not in the Salt-Gila basin nor in southern and western Arizona, with
the exception of one possible hair-whorled figure north of Tucson. They appear
along the San Juan River and may extend into the Fremont culture area to the
north. A western boundary occurs somewhere around Prescott, Seligman, and the
Grand Canyon, except for one figure in the Coso Range of California that appears
to represent hair whorls. Hair whorl depictions are abundant in the Rio Grande
region, especially after a.p. [300, but they do not seem to extend to the Plains.
(I am not yet convinced by the figure at Legend Rock in Wyoming, depicted by
Francis and Loendorf [2002, 101]; see figure 2.19 in this volume.) Equivocal
figures in the Big Bend area of Texas and Durango, Mexico (home of more lin-
guistic relatives to the Hopi), bear further investigation.
 "MAIDENS” AND FLUTE PLAYERS 135

To my knowledge, the earliest hair whorl depictions appear in Canyon de

Chelly in northeastern Arizona. Fiber embedded in mud structure remnants over-
lying one such figure (figure 7.4) radiocarbon-dated circa a.p. 200 (L. Loendorf,
personal communication 2002). Details of shape, technique, pigments, and asso-
ciated figures suggest a date range between a.p. I and 600 for similar figures
because these paintings resemble figures thought to date to this era in the Four

ae Page CDM104 ; 1810£40BP

L ae, }

:= Ww
ay \ 68.2%
‘ confidence ;
cman AL 130AD (67.0%) 250AD
k “ WA 310AD( 1.2%) 320AD
— F a non 95.4% confidence
t aoe Cos 80AD (1.8%) OAD |
oatiaal 3 a
eee “hy+ LN,AA, ~ 120AD (93.6%) 340AD |4
1700BP ~
1600BP = |
1S00BP §-

| ee u
ae |ee |

ay eens RN See =
ene Yor Bassai Anseiatensnnissanin ennssonentik

200CalIBC alAD
CalBC/CalAD =.200CalAD = 400CalAD =— 600
Calibrated date
Fig. 7.4 Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Figure with hair whorls (top left) underlying mud wall
attachment from a storage structure that has fallen away. Organic temper in the mud returned a
radiocarbon date of approximately A.0. 200. Computer-enhanced photo and graph showing
probability for calibrated radiocarbon date by Robert Mark, courtesy of the National Park Service.
136 CHARTERS i

Corners area (Robins and Hays-Gilpin 2000). In figure 7.5, a figure holding a
U-shaped stick bends over a recumbent figure with square hair whorls and a trian-
gular garment sometimes described as a “menstrual apron” (Cole 1990, 124).
Strings attached to a waistband were pulled between the legs and tucked in back,
forming a triangular shape over the pubic area; such aprons or string skirts occur
only on female burials of this period, and they sometimes bear stains of menstrual
blood. Campbell Grant (1978, 185) interpreted this scene as a shaman’s attend-
ing to a female patient, but it seems to me more likely that the U-shaped stick is
the very same item used today to shape a Hopi maiden’s hair whorls (called a
poli’inngéla, “butterfly-hairdo-wheel” [Hopi Dictionary Project 1998]; a historic
example is visible in figure 7.1). Just to the left of this tableau, a second pair of
figures appears, with a similar style but in a different pigment. The smaller figure
has hair whorls and the larger one carries a poli’inngéla.
Figures with hair whorls appear regularly in Colorado Plateau rock art sites
that probably date to the a.p. 600s and on black-on-white pottery from the heart
of the Plateau in southwestern Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and eastern
Arizona. The pottery dates from the 600s to the 800s, later than the earliest rock

Fig. 7.5 Canyon de Chelly (CDC-25), Arizona. Figures with hair whorls paired with figures
holding U-shaped stick; white, yellow, and red paint. Probably late Basketmaker II period (ca. a.0.
200-500). Computer-enhanced photo by Robert Mark, courtesy of the National Park Service.
 “MAIDENS” AND FLUTE PLAYERS L37

art depictions but easier to date via association with tree-ring dated habitation
structures. One pottery fragment from Houck, Arizona, was found in a pithouse
whose timbers were tree-ring dated to the late a.p. 700s and early 800s (figure
3b; Hays-Gilpin and van Hartesveldt 1998, 61-62).
Figures with hair whorls, then, are firmly associated with the distribution of
ancestral Puebloan cultures, including those that archaeologists call Mogollon and
Anasazi (Hisatsinom, in Hop). During the 600s to the 800s, villages made up of
large pithouses surrounding early great kiva structures appear throughout the
Four Corners area. Matrilocal extended families probably became the primary
residence unit during this period, together with ritual sodalities that integrated
unrelated men who married into the small villages (Hays 1992; Robins and Hays-
Gilpin 2000). A second florescence of hair-whorled figures appears on pottery
dating between about a.p. 1350 and 1600, primarily in the Hopi area (figure
7.3¢,f) and in the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico. Community growth and
increasing elaboration of the ritual system also characterized this period, albeit on
a much larger scale.
Are the hair whorls associated with female figures and not with male figures?
Numerous figures with hair whorls also have female genitalia; several with hair
whorls have the string aprons worn by women in ancestral Puebloan cultures at
least until the mid-I 100s. Many figures with hair whorls have no indication of
sex or gender, and I have found only two instances of figures with hair whorls
and what might be penises (figure 7.6).
The first possibly male figure appears on a petroglyph on Leroux Wash in the
middle Little Colorado River drainage, which probably dates to the mid-1200s
(Hays-Gilpin 2000a, 171); the second instance comprises a pair of painted fig-
ures in Snake Gulch, near Kanab, Utah (Schaafsma 1980, 119), which appear to
be early, perhaps Basketmaker II (prior to a.p. SOO or so). They have square
shapes floating on each side of the head, barely above the shoulders, and may be
simply one of many elaborate hairstyles or headdresses depicted in this area and
possibly related Fremont figures to the north. If these indeed represent hair
whorls and penises, rather than female genitals or menstruation, which seems just
as likely, these figures may represent males who chose to take on a feminine gen-
der identity, as did a small proportion of males in nearly every traditional Native
American society (Hollimon 2001; Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang 1997; Roscoe
1991, 1998). Because exceptions are so rare, the correlation between hair whorls
and feminine gender identity is strong, even in the earliest depictions.
Figures with hair whorls seem to represent females, but do they represent
“maidens,” females between puberty and marriage? First, many other images have
female genitalia and lack hair whorls, suggesting that not all females, but only a
[38 CHAPTERS

b.
Fig. 7.6 Ambiguous figures with hair whorls: a, near Holbrook, Arizona, line between legs may
represent a penis or menstruation (drawing by Patricia McCreery, after photo by Kelley Hays-
Gilpin); b, polychrome paintings in Snake Gulch, north of Grand Canyon (drawing by Patricia
McCreery, after Schaafsma 1980, 119), short lines between legs may represent male or female
genitals.

special category, wore this hairstyle. Second, a few figures with hair whorls seem
to correlate with depictions of menstruation and courtship. Possible representa-
tions of menstruation appear in the form of discontinuous, wavy, Or otherwise
elaborated lines between a figure’s legs (figure 7.7); many such depictions have
hair whorls. Several hair-whorled figures are paired with flute players (figure 7.8).
One of these has hair whorls and a short line below her groin that may represent
menstruation (figure 7.8a); several have hair whorls and clearly female genitals,
and the others are more equivocal. Of course, flute players and maidens appear in
other contexts, and many other figures appear with flute players; but the consis-
tent, though rare, appearance of menstruation and courtship depictions does sug-
gest that hair whorls could have indicated “maiden” status in the past as well as
the present.
 “MAIDENS” AND FLUTE PLAYERS oh)

Fig. 7.7 Probable depictions of menstruation, Lyman Lake, Arizona. Petroglyphs on rough
basalt. Photo by Kelley Hays-Gilpin.

Other Sexed Personages

If butterfly hair whorls served as the outward and visible sign of maidenhood in
the past as well as in the present, then maidens have been a key symbol for Pueb-
loan people for nearly two thousand years. Tracking formal variations, contexts,
and frequencies in time and space should provide an excellent archaeological com-
plement to traditional histories and should help elucidate changes and variations
in gender arrangements. Rock art of the Puebloan region shows male and female
sexed individuals in a variety of activities, together with a variety of probable
supernatural personages of both sexes. In general, frequency of sexed-figure depic-
tions increases over time, suggesting increasing importance of gender distinctions
as Puebloan ancestors took up a mobile-farming lifestyle; then a village-farming
lifestyle; and after 1300, a lifestyle of intensive agriculture and larger, aggregated
villages (Hays-Gilpin 2000c). For the earliest settled village farmers, between
about a.p. 400 and 700, imagery such as the lobed circle complex; possibly an
140 CHARLER

b. C.

Fig. 7.8 ‘‘Maidens’’ paired with phallic flute players: a, Catron County, New Mexico
(photodrawing courtesy of J. Louis Argend-Farlow); b, La Cieneguilla, near Santa Fe, New Mexico
(photodrawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin); c, La Cieneguilla, near Santa Fe, New Mexico
(photodrawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin).

abstracted womb (or breast) figure (Manning 1992); and depictions of maidens
with butterfly hair whorls suggests that female fertility may have emerged early
on as an important metaphor for all fertility, increase, and perhaps some aspects
of creation itself.
Depiction of sexed beings that can be linked with personages mentioned in
historic Pueblo oral traditions appear by 1100s. Female figures include the
 “MAIDENS” AND FLUTE PLAYERS 14]

Mother of the Hero Twins, Corn Maidens, and the Mother of Game Animals.
Many are associated with fertility in some sense, but not all are benevolent and
nurturing—at least, not all the time. Few fit our romanticized contemporary
image of Mother Earth (Hays-Gilpin 2000a). The important thing to remember
about Puebloan iconography is that almost everything can serve as a “fertility
symbol” of some sort, so an association between a flute player and game animals,
corn plants, or female figures is not enough to distinguish one personage from
another, nor one symbolic meaning from another. Likewise, female figures are not
all Mother Earth; not all are benevolent and nurturing. The Mother of Game
Animals has a great deal to do with fertility, but her sexuality is hardly benevolent.
She seduces young men and, more often than not, kills them. Those who survive
a sexual encounter with her are great hunters thereafter, but the experience was
not something young Hopi men are likely to have pursued. Patricia McCreery
identified depictions of the Mother of Game Animals in rock art by recognizing
the following associations in the rock art and the oral traditions: a female figure
with prominent genitals accompanied by game animals, consistently located in
the Little Colorado River Valley where this Personage is said to dwell (McCreery
and McCreery 1986). Images of bows and arrows, and feet with phallic middle
toes, at the Lacey Point site (figure 7.9) further suggest some sort of supplication
of this deity by male hunters, even though no such ritual is recorded in the litera-
ture.
Male figures are more difficult to link to specific personages in oral traditions,
but again a variety of roles and poses appear (figure 7.10). Masculine priests,
hunters, and flute players are also associated with fertility and increase in historic
accounts, as well as in the contexts of their depictions in rock art. This pattern
suggests that in Pueblo thought, the symbolic job of promoting fertility is not
limited to women, even though female fertility and childbirth provide central
metaphors for many kinds of creativity, fertility, abundance, and well-being.

Phallic Flute Players

Flute players appear earliest in rock art that dates to the a.p. 600s. The phallic
flute player has been popularly misidentified as “Kokopelli.” We can almost
always identify flute player depictions as male for several reasons: many, though
not all, have obvious penises. Oral traditions refer to a variety of flute-playing
characters, and all are males. The flute is apparently one of several “tools” that
are gendered masculine in the Pueblos, together with digging sticks, bows, arrows,
spears, and so forth (Loftin 1991). Flutes are the musical instrument of choice
142 CHAPTER 7

Fig. 7.9 Mother of Game Animals with flute player, game animals, bows and arrows, and
footprints with phallic middle toes, Middle Little Colorado River, Arizona. Photo by Kelley Hays-
Gilpin.

in courtship. The rare instances of flutes found in graves are all with adult males.
The graphic parallel between penis and flute is obvious in the corpus of flute-
player images, so even when a penis is not depicted, it is still there by implication.
Contemporary artists and producers of souvenirs (clocks, socks, key chains, bottle
openers, and more) exploit Kokopelli’s sexual—musical ambiguity.
Flute players in oral traditions are clearly not all the same thing, even though
most may refer to fertility in a broad sense and some may refer to migration and
traders. Ironically, few (maybe none) of them are Kokopellis, except in the popu-
lar imagination and in the misguided writings of a few scholars. In the popular
literature, several Hopi characters have been conflated (Malotki 2000) and thus
attributed to the rock art undoubtedly made as a result of a number of different
cultural traditions from Mexico to Canada. A similar figure appears at Pahi in
Tanzania (Leakey 1983, fig. 26; see figure 7.11). Basically, there are only so many
ways one can draw a figure playing a flute or whistle, and there are so many
cultures that use such instruments. So wide is his fame that somebody, inevitably,
will identify an African Kokopelli.
Kookopélé is the Hopt robber fly, a trickster figure, which does not carry a flute
 "MAIDENS" AND FLUTE PLAYERS 143

d. e.
| _— f
Fig. 7.10 Male figures in the Southwest: a, with bow and arrow, La Cieneguilla, near Santa Fe,
New Mexico; b, La Bajada, New Mexico; c, Hardscrabble Wash, Arizona; d, Navajo County,
Arizona; e, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona; f, Nine Mile Canyon, Utah. Drawings by
Patricia McCreery.

but often does have a prominent penis. Lenhoya, Flute Boy, is a totem of the Hop1
Flute clans, several groups of affiliated families in several different Hop villages.
Maabu ts a cicada whose “fluting” brings warmth. Neither Lenhoya nor Maabu neces-
sarily has an erect phallus. Maahu traveled with the Flute clan on their migrations
but also with a number ofother clans, including the Sun clan, which also has the
responsibility for bringing the warmth necessary for germinating crops. The
humped back of many of these figures may refer to the actual shape of certain
insects, such as the robber fly and cicada; to a backpack filled with seeds or trade
goods; or perhaps both. Images of flute players paired with maidens seem to cor-
relate most closely to the Zuni story about how Paiyatamu, a young male solar
deity, lures home the Corn Maidens who fled mistreatment in the village. Paiya-
144 CHAPTER 7

=
Fig. 7.11 Flute player-like figure from Pahi 27, Tanzania, Africa (drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin,
after Leakey 1983, fig. 26). The formal resemblance between this African figure and Southwestern
flute-player depictions popularly exploited as “Kokopelli” should be enough to demonstrate that
labeling every flute-bearing figure a ‘‘Kokopelli’’ is pointless.

tamu and his Eastern Pueblo counterparts are also related to the sun and germina-
tion, as well as to courtship and seduction. The pairing of maidens and flute
players is probably about the necessary combination of moisture (rain), repre-
sented by the maiden and her butterfly hair whorls, and warmth, represented by
the solar flute player, to the germination of plant life, and secondarily to human
pregnancy.
 "MAIDENS” AND FLUTE PLAYERS 145

It's possible, even probable, that many of the flute-playing figures in South-
western rock art have no direct ethnographic referent but refer to bygone practices
and characters. Ann Phillips (2002) recently connected the curving headgear of
many flute-player images with mountain sheep horns, rather than insect antennae.
She posits a transition to flute-playing rainmakers from earlier rainmaking prac-
tices associated with mountain sheep spirit helpers, probably shared by Hopi
ancestors and other Uto-Aztecan speaking groups of the Southwest, Great Basin,
and California. The specific referents to sun, warmth, courtship, insects, and ger-
mination may represent a different set of traditions, perhaps emanating from
Mesoamerica or from non-Uto-Aztecan Eastern Pueblos. Through deliberate
manipulation of such symbols, ritual practitioners were able to merge the two
(and perhaps more) traditions, probably quite easily.

Rock Art and Life Cycles

Rock art probably played an active role in merging different traditions during
migration and aggregation of Puebloan peoples—if not in puberty ritual, then in
other practices. Hopi ritual practices that do involve rock art include sun watch-
ing and other astronomical observations; boundary marking; marking the move-
ment of social groups as in clan migrations; marking shrines used by particular
sodalities; and depiction of katsinam and other immortal beings from oral tradi-
tions such as Maahu, corn maidens, the maiden mother of the Hero Twins, Spider
Grandmother, and others. Life-cycle symbolism inheres in most of these beings,
and each represents social and ceremonial relationships among members of differ-
ent genders and generations. The flute player evokes migration, seasonal changes,
rain, courtship, and the masculine role in procreation and agricultural productiv-
ity. The female reproductive cycle is a metaphor for the growth of maize, their
staple crop; and the growth of maize is a metaphor for the female life cycle. Both
are inseparable from the cycle of the seasons, the ritual calendar, and all the key
features of nature that signal these cycles, including butterflies and flowers. Long,
flowing hair symbolizes the dark summer rain clouds, and shaping hair into but-
terfly hair whorls confines all the potentiality of the seasons into one key symbol
embodied by young women. The ubiquity of the maiden image cannot help but
shape feminine behavior, as well as reflect and shape all these abstract ideas. The
highly visible butterfly hair whorls evoke an ideal world of rain, abundant flowers
and butterflies, growing maize, and human fertility and marriageability, perhaps
especially important in the multifamily villages that were forming in the a.p. 600s
through 900s. They also remind the wearer and all viewers that here was an indi-
vidual in the process of assuming her ritual and social responsibilities, most
146 CHAPTER 7

important in the large, aggregated, ritually complex communities of the 1300s

and later. The antiquity of this distinct hairstyle, and the apparent long-lived
association of this practice with female puberty, suggests that young women had
a role in shaping the increasingly complex Puebloan ritual system, not only as
“symbols” but as active participants.
Traditional stories are still told, and the traditional puberty ceremony some-
times still takes place. During almost any visit to a Pueblo, we may see katsinas
dancing in the plazas, visiting shrines, and handing out presents and punishments
to children. We may see maidens lined up on the edge of the plaza at the Hopi
Home Dance in late summer, and we may see them entering the kivas for their
sodality initiations. Butterfly hair whorls are a living tradition, as well as an
ancient one. At several “Girl Power” seminars held at the Hopi Cultural Center,
Lucinda Andreani has presented her current master’s thesis research about butter-
fly hair whorls in rock art (Andreani and Kuyvaya 2000). Girls, mothers, and
grandmothers enjoyed discussing traditional puberty rites and agreed that the
ceremony should be continued to help show community support for individual
girls as they take on new responsibilities. Many were surprised to learn that this
tradition has been passed down continuously for nearly two millennia.
Sacred Landscapes and Social Landscapes 8

es

F WE WANT TO UNDERSTAND something about why people made rock art,

[= we need to realize that the landscape contexts of rock art are just as
important as the rock art images themselves (Bradley 1997; Nash and Chip-
pindale 2002; Ross 2001; Whitley 1998). Not only can images be gendered, but
so can places. Aspects of physical location that people who made rock art appar-
ently valued include the following:

Geomorphological attributes: caves; water; and the colors and textures of rocks,
sand, and clay
Viewshed: how much of the surrounding landscape can be viewed from a partic-
ular location and what astronomical events can be viewed at particular
times and places
Passage of light and shadow: often linked to the changing seasons; sometimes the
changing shapes oflight and shadows are important (as in figure 4.7)
Acoustical properties: echoes; resonance; magnification of voices, whispers, or the
sounds of wind and water
Plants that grow near rock art: colored flowers, medicinal herbs, hallucinogens such
as jimsonweed (sacred datura)

The rock panel faces themselves rarely serve as neutral backdrops for rock art
motifs—'they were in a real sense as symbolically important as the iconography”
(Whitley 1998). This context is particularly true of rock art produced by hunter—
gatherers, who often use rock art to help navigate networks of important places
and who often practice shamanism or shamanistic religions. Some view the rock
surface as a membrane between this world and the spirit world. For the Numic
speakers of the Great Basin, for example, caves, fissures, and canyons may provide
portals to that world. For the San of southern Africa, waterholes are portals to
the underworld and to the mythological past. Flowing water and prominent land-
scape features may concentrate or channel spiritual power. Rock art sites often
appear on or near trails used by wild game, traders, pilgrims, migrants, or people

147
148 CHAPTER 8

on their way to acquire certain resources, physical or spiritual. Rock surfaces near
springs, stream fords, habitation sites, and places where particular plants grow
seem to attract attention.
Sometimes rock art seems concentrated in places where the landscape changes
shape or where the view one has of it changes—for example, at the base of a cliff,
the mouth of a canyon, or at a mountain pass. For hunter—gatherers, “territories
are not conceived of as blocks of land with boundaries, but as paths and sites,
trails running through landscape and the views across it” (Ross 2001, 456). By
moving through landscapes in prescribed ways, people may reenact important sto-
ries, which is especially true for the hunter—gatherers of the Australian Desert,
where rock art sites often mark places and display imagery important to events
that took place “in the Dreamtime.” Ethnographers working in the American
Great Basin have recorded similar landscape-linked stories, associating the travels
of creator beings with particular landscape features. They suggest that the term
“storied rocks” better describes local views of rock paintings and engravings than
“rock art” (Zedefio, Stoffle, and Shaul 2001).
Farmers, too, marked landscape features with rock art—paintings in southern
Utah circa 200 B.c. to 200 a.p., in the Basketmaker II period, often depict large,
broad-shouldered humans in male—female pairs (figure 8.1). Their location near
prime farmland suggests that they mark the territory of mobile farmers. Botanical
and pollen evidence from Basketmaker habitation sites suggest that they grew
their maize in lush canyon bottoms dusing the summer but migrated to upland
areas to hunt and gather wild resources in other seasons (Hyder 1997). Sedentary
farmers of southern Europe engraved pictures of men, oxen, plows, and perhaps
maps of fields. Sometimes, as in Italy’s Valcamonica, these pictures are located
adjacent to fields. Sometimes, as on Mount Bego, farmers put pictures on moun-
tain tops and cliff faces far from the locations of the actual depicted activities,
suggesting that they have more to do with the social statuses of the artists than
with marking particular farming or herding localities.
Viewing such places through the lens of gender means a lot more than trying
to discover whether men or women (or both) made, used, or viewed rock art. It
means thinking about the possibility that people who made rock art thought
about landscape features as having gender or as being gendered. The perceived
gender of a place may influence how and why people used it and which people
used it. The perceived gender of a place may depend on factors other than who
did what activities there in the first place. For example, are grinding slicks, and
their frequently associated rock art, “feminine places” because women ground
seeds or grain there, or did they choose that place to grind because it was per-
ceived as a feminine place and therefore a good place to grind? Both and neither:
 SACRED LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPES 149

‘ag Bae re es . $ aa Se 2

Fig. 8.1 Male-female pair, Basketmaker II period, southeastern Utah. Photo by William Hyder
(1997):

the place and the activities create each other. How a landscape is gendered may
be influenced not just by the actual activities of men and women but also by
metaphors based in physical attributes—such as the colors, shapes, and textures
of rocks; the growth cycles of plants; and the previous human activities in a par-
ticular place. Gender is an important aspect of metaphorical thinking, and
hunter—gatherers, farmers, and herders in the past were often masters of meta-
phor.
The notion of gender without sex is familiar to speakers of European Jan-
guages that gender most nouns, but it can be difficult for many English speakers
to grasp. Most cultures attribute gender to at least some inanimate objects,
abstract concepts, and landscape features. Sometimes choice of gender seems arbi-
trary; sometimes metaphors are involved. The similar length of the moon's phases
and most young adult women’s menstrual cycles provides an obvious analogy, so
the moon is feminine in most cultures, but not always. Pairing the moon with the
sun is also an obvious symbolic move, so the sun is often gendered masculine—
but, again, not always. Anything that can be thought about in pairs may be
assigned symbolic attributes, such as right—left, light—dark, day-night, high—low,
and masculine—feminine. As structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss have argued,
150)” “GHAPTIERSS

however, what’s most interesting is not a universal human tendency to think this
way (although recognizing the similarities is fundamentally important); what’s
most interesting are the variations, the wide variety in what cultures do with sets
of symbols, with oppositions (binary and otherwise), and with concepts such as
reciprocity (Penner 1998, 152).
Humans have come up with many ways of structuring symbolic thought.
Western European cultures (including their North American and other colonies)
tend to arrange the members of such ‘pairs hierarchically, with the masculine/
light/high/day/sun/right side dominating the feminine/dark/low/night/
moon/left (distaff, sinestral—sinister) side. In contrast, many Asian and Native
American cultures view such pairs as complementary, interdependent, and inter-
penetrating, such as yin and yang. The Navajo Hero Twins, for example, were
born as twin brothers, but Monster Slayer is the elder masculine brother, and
Born for Water is the younger feminine brother. To have one without the other
is to miss the point, and their symbols, the bow and the hair knot, usually appear
together in Navajo rock art (figure 8.2). Together they get things done, and sex
and gender need not coincide in a fixed relationship.
The Navajo also gender almost everything about their landscape. There are
male mountains (high, craggy) and female mountains (lower, more rounded);
male rain (hard and driving) and female rain (gentle and penetrating); and male
rivers (that run hard in canyons when in flood) and female rivers (that can spread
out over their banks). Numic and Yuman speakers of the Great Basin and Califor-
nia gender a similar desert landscape in different ways from their Navajo neigh-
bors: high places are masculine relative to feminine low places. Mountain peaks

Fig. 8.2. Symbols of the Navajo Hero Twins: Monster Slayer’s bow and Born for Water’s hair
knot, northern New Mexico. Drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin.
 SACRED LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPES IS]

are masculine; caves are feminine. Even though the details are slightly different,
commonalities can be seen in the two systems. These are based in analogies with
human bodies, especially genitals, and the shapes of male and female bodies,
which is due to typically different distributions of fat and muscle. Rounded
shapes on the landscape are often likened to female bodies.
We should therefore be able to say a great deal about rock art and gendered
landscapes when we know who made the rock art and what their ideas about
gender symbolism were. We also should be able to use analogy to either formulate
some hypotheses or tell some plausible stories about rock art, gender, and land-
scape in the distant past, even if all the descendents of those who made it have
gone. But we must exercise caution: we cannot assume that all cultures in the past
had binary gender systems as did Western Europeans, Navajos, and the San of
the Kalahari, for example; nor should we assume that binary gender systems work
the same way.

Friends in Low Places: California and the Great Basin

Ethnographic and archaeological research by David Whitley in the Great Basin
and California and by Maria Nieves Zedefio, Richard Stoffle, and colleagues in
the Great Basin is beginning to reveal a very rich symbolic landscape still under-
stood and valued by living members of Numic-, Takic-, Penutian-, and Yuman-
speaking peoples. Gender is a key principle that structures landscape in this region
for all the indigenous people who live there still.
Throughout California and the Great Basin, Native people considered rock
art sites to be feminine-gendered places, even though they were used almost exclu-
sively by men (Whitley 1998). The exception is the female puberty sites with
rattlesnake imagery (figure 6.3) found in Southern California: these are masculine
places. This exception helps explain the placement, uses, and gendering of rock
art sites. People’s conception oftheir world in this area is structured by inversions
in gender symbolism. Rattlesnakes are gendered masculine for obvious reasons of
shape, so they are appropriate spirit helpers and guardians for women. The associ-
ations among rattlesnakes, women, and danger may be very widespread and
ancient—the Aztec goddess Coatlicue wore a serpent skirt. In California and the
Great Basin, rattlesnake designs were used on cradleboards for female infants and
in basketry made and used by women. Whitley suggests that vulva-form petro-
glyphs in this region are therefore unlikely to have been made by women, as Davis
(1961) suggests (chapter 6). Rather, they were probably made by men, specifi-
cally sorcerers, as the vagina and menstrual blood were thought to be particularly
dangerous to men and boys. Members of each gender therefore deployed power-
ful and dangerous symbols of the opposite and complementary gender.
152 CHAPTER 8

Apart from the female puberty sites described in chapter 6, most rock art sites
in this region were made and used by male shamans, who contacted spirit helpers
and tapped the power and paraphernalia stored in the rocks. Among the Numic
names for rock art sites are words referring to the color red, because menstrual
blood is red; this color is also associated with the western direction and the land
of the dead, and the word for baske-—items made by women but also used as
obvious natural womb symbols. Numic creations stories often have supernatural
beings born out of a basket.
Rock art sites were also referred to as symbolic vaginas. Numic shamans used
a ritual staff to open a crack in the rock, the earth’s vagina. As noted in an earlier
chapter, many of the rocks in many places in this region physically resemble vagi-
nas, providing a logical source for this metaphor, but there ts more to it. In certain
cultures where shamanism is practiced, entry to the supernatural is said to be like
intercourse. For Numic people, rock art sites are places where this act had been
done and could be done again, so rock art sites must therefore be feminine.
Because females need a complementary masculine spirit helper, rock art sites were
said to be guarded by rattlesnakes, as were the vaginas of mythic women. In this
culture, few women and homosexuals became shamans because their sexuality pre-
cluded the appropriate form of intercourse with the supernatural. In many bands,
women could “in theory” become shamans; but in practice, only a few did (Kelly
1939, ISI; Park 1975, 20), and Park reports that no Paiute “berdaches” became
shamans (Park 1975, 21). Like the vagina, rock art sites were also considered
dangerous places.
The distribution of rock art sites on the landscape in Nevada is a function of
perceived distributions of power (Stoffle, Zedefio, and Halmo 2001, 58-97).
Power is attracted to certain kinds of places, including rockshelters, caves, springs,
rock outcrops, and mountain peaks. All these locations are likely to have rock art,
with the exception of mountain peaks. Again, the exception provides confirmation
of the theory of gender inversions. Mountain peaks are important places in the
creation stories of almost all Far Western groups. Yet the peaks themselves were
not the focus of vision quests; rather, rock art sites associated with vision quests
are in canyons and valleys, at lower elevations. “This was because the symbolism
of the landscape—like that of the sites themselves—was gendered. It was based
on a widespread directional opposition which equated males with up/high/
mountain, and females with down/low/valley” (Whitley 1998, 22). For some
groups, the words for mountain in many place-names translates as “penis erected”
(1993 ;23))
Mountains, then, are masculine; rock art sites are feminine; and rock art sites
are located within the feminine-gendered spaces of the supernatural landscape:
 SACRED LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPES 153

rock outcrops, caves, and water sources, all found at relatively low elevations. As
a result of the gendering of the landscape and particular places, people of different
genders are attracted to a place or they avoid it, not the other way around. For
example, water spirits supposedly inhabited springs and took children away.
Therefore, women and children probably avoided springs that had pictographs
near them (Zedefio, Stoffle, and Shaul 2001, 134). Cot Cave in the Nevada Test
Site is probably a gender-restricted place; based on its hidden and elevated loca-
tions, as well as its black-painted holes on the rock, perhaps it’s a site for male
vision quests or wishes. Men interviewed about the site described the function of
the painted holes as “for focusing the vision.” Female elders called it a bad place
and wouldn't go near it (Zedefio, Stoffle, and Shaul 2001, 134).
Since World War II, Indian people whose ancestors used the area of the
Nevada Test Site were denied access by the U.S. military. When allowed to return
in the 1990s to provide input into new land management planning, consultants
recognized many places they had only heard about in stories. The First Menses
site in Hot Creek Valley, southern Nevada, is probably a female initiation site,
based on ethnographic interviewing with members of several Numic-speaking
tribes. At the First Menses site, the landscape setting was more readily acknowl-
edged than the content of the rock art in the native consultants’ interpretation of
the place’s cultural significance. The physical attributes are consistent with tradi-
tional knowledge about where women should conduct puberty rituals: the canyon
is secluded from view, with running water and abundant fine white sand. Typical
of rock art sites in the area, petroglyphs are concentrated at the entrance to the
east-facing keyhole-shaped canyon. Nearby are a groundstone quarry, a paint
source, medicinal plants, a wooden pole used to teach women to knock down and
gather pinyon nuts, and an eagle’s nest, all said by numerous native consultants
to be consistent with this use. At places like this one, older women taught pubes-
cent girls about childbirth, medicine, and women’s gathering tasks. Girls were also
given their first grinding stones from quarries like the one described here (Stoffle,
Zedefio, and Halmo 2001, 134; Stoffle et al. 2000, [O—12; Arnold et al. 1997).
Confirming, but not determining, the interpretation of the locality as a female
initiation site are the nearby petroglyphs depicting vulvas and other “female” sym-
bols. Consultants said that the vulva depictions (figure 8.3) and bird tracks in the
petroglyphs were important in the women’s ceremonies that undoubtedly took
place here.
Is the First Menses site a feminine place used by women? Does it negate
Whitley's argument that Numic landscapes and their uses are structured by gen-
der inversions? Not necessarily. Consultants noted that a bear petroglyph there
represents the protector of the site. Bears were not only propitiated for their role
154. CHAPTER 8

Fig. 8.3. Petroglyphs at the First Menses Site, Hot Creek Valley, Nevada. From Arnold and
colleagues (1997), courtesy of the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, University of
Arizona.

as hunters but for their ability “to make men and women successful in their sex
lives” (Arnold et al. 1997, 50). In addition, bird tracks were also said to refer to
male runners, as were the unequivocal depictions of knotted strings, which were
traditionally carried by male runners from place to place to tell people about
events (Stoffle et al. 2000, 91-92). Thus, when taken together, such images indi-
cate masculine referents at the same sites. Whitley concludes:

That the supernatural was the inverse of the natural, moreover, further
amplifies an understanding of the gender symbolism of sites. For it is
also clear that, while one level of meaning in the gender and sexual
symbolism of male rock-art sites pertained to the shaman’s ASC as a
kind of ritual intercourse, at another the hyper-virile shaman still
desired a masculine supernatural power—most easily obtained by
entering the supernatural from the inverse in the natural, feminine-
gendered rock-art sites, rather than masculine mountain peaks. And it
 SACRED LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPES ICs}

is then understandable why male shamans’ rock art sites were given
feminine generic names, while girls’ puberty initiation sites were known
instead as the “[male| shaman’s house.” Just as the male shaman
entered the supernatural at feminine places to obtain masculine kinds
of power, or at dry places to acquire rain-making power, so too then
did young girls enter the sacred at masculine locations needed for
childbirth, which was the emphasis of their puberty initiation. (1998,
25)

The elevational distribution of rock art imagery of northern Numic-speaking

Shoshone territory in Wyoming seems to be based on similar principles to those
of their relatives in California and Nevada, but with different expressions. Spatial
analysis of Dinwoody-style petroglyphs of the Wind River mountains and Big
Horn Basin revealed high frequencies of bird images in high elevations; high fre-
quencies of snakes, turtles, and water ghosts in the lowest elevations in the Big
Horn basin; and horned figures, bison, bears, and bear tracks dominating rock art
sites in between (Francis and Loendorf 2002, 118-22). Shoshone cosmography
divides both the natural and supernatural worlds into parallel realms of sky peo-
ple, ground people, and water people (figure 8.4).
Significantly, many of the water ghost images are clearly females, with genitals,
breasts, or fringed skirts. Pa waip, Water Ghost Woman, is said to live in the
water with her helper, a turtle. She shoots people with invisible arrows to make
them sick, grabs people and pulls them under the water or ice, and entices men
into sexual encounters before drowning or devouring them. People know she is
around when they hear her crying. In figure 8.5, we see her depicted with tear
streaks on her cheeks. Her right foot is just entering or emerging from a crack in
the rock. This petroglyph in the lower elevations of Hot Springs County, Wyo-
ming, stands not far from running water and bubbling hot springs, just the sorts
of places said to be animated by water ghosts. Gendering the landscape here has
little to do with human activities and a great deal to do with the distribution of
spiritual beings and powers, but these powers are not simply those ofa dangerous
Sky Father and a nurturing Earth Mother. Euro-Americans have learned to expect
such distorted, romantic versions of Native American traditions, but Water
Ghost Woman is clearly not a gentle, nurturing Earth Mother, welcoming weary
travelers to the warm valleys and a nice, peaceful soak in the hot springs.

Rock Art and Sacred Landscapes in Norway

Can we learn something about gender and landscape when we do not have directly
relevant ethnographic information? Can we apply analogies from other cultures
156 CHAPTER 8

(Zenith)
Lightning

(Nadir)
Rattlesnakes

Fig. 8.4 Tripartite organization of Shoshonean cosmography with some of the beings and
creatures that inhabit each of the spiritual realms. From Francis and Loendorf (2002, fig. 6.36).
Courtesy of the University of Utah Press and Julie Francis.

when living practitioners of the cultures we want to study vanished or changed

long ago? Maybe. The Vingen site in southern Norway is a small, narrow fjord
surrounded by one-thousand-meter-high hillsides rising almost vertically from the
sea. According to radiocarbon dates of dwellings nearby, the engravings found on
the rock boulders and cliff faces probably date to the Late Mesolithic/Early Neo-
lithic transition period, spanning four to five hundred years of use by hunter—
gatherers, sometime between 7500 and 5200 B.p. (Lodeen 2001).The fjord is
still a good fishing area today, and the surrounding mountains would have been
an excellent hunting ground for red deer. The site has about two thousand
engravings, mostly depictions of red deer, with some humans and some geometric
patterns (figure 8.6).
Some of the geometric figures might represent vulvas. Few of the human fig-
ures have any indication of sex, but a few have a vulvalike marking on the abdo-
men. Some have a line between the legs, which might be a penis but, in some
cases, could also be explained as representing a vulva. The figures are clearly sex-
ambiguous. In spite of the paucity of obvious gender content in the art itself and
the utter lack of direct historical information about the meanings of the figures,
researcher Gro Mandt (2001) thinks gender has a great deal to do with under-
standing Vingen.
 SACRED LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPES 157

Fig. 8.5 Ghost Water Woman petroglyphs near Thermopolis, Wyoming. Drawing by Linda
Olson, from Francis and Loendorf (2002, fig. 6.34), courtesy of the University of Utah Press and
Julie Francis.

One of the first things the new student of rock art usually notices is that
unmarked rocks always outnumber marked ones. Large expanses of cliff face,
exposed bedrock, and boulder fields that would have been suitable for making
petroglyphs remain blank, and figures cluster in just a few areas. Why? Functional
explanations usually prevail—petroglyphs mark trails, springs, resource areas, ter-
ritorial boundaries, and so forth. But a cautious use of ethnography often turns
up other reasons, including the perceived distribution of spiritually powerful
places in the landscape. Often, functionally important places also have spiritual
power, but sometimes there’s more going on. Cultures with a shamanistic cosmol-
ogy tend to identify sacred space as places where the levels of a layered cosmos
meet. The axis mundi, or “world tree,” is said to join the upper and lower worlds
to this one and facilitate movement from one level to another (Mandt 2001, 306;
Eliade 1964; Ouzman 1998). Natural features of the Vingen landscape may have
suggested such an opening between worlds to the hunter—gatherers who made
rock art there, marking it as a sacred place:
158 CHAPTER 8

Fig. 8.6 Rock art at Vingen, Norway: top, humans, including probable female and birthing
figures (Mandt 2001, fig. 16.12); bottom, animals (Mandt 2001, fig. 16.7). Courtesy of Gro
Mandt.

Two distinguishing features of the Vingen landscape may help to

explain why it was constituted as a powerful and potent place, suited
for rock art production. In the first place, there is the mountain Hor-
nelen, rising precipitously from the sea. The peak is reported to have
been even higher in earlier centuries, ending in a point or “horn.” It
does not seem too far-fetched to suggest that this mountain peak may
 SACRED LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPES 159

have constituted an axis mundi—the center of the world—reaching lit-

erally from the underworld up to the sky.
Secondly, the entire lay-out of the Vingen landscape may have
characterized the site as something different from the profane world.
When approaching the outlet of the tiny fjord, one gets the impression
of passing through a “gate,” of being let into a secluded, almost secret,
and even a little awe-inspiring, space. The whole scenario could be con-
strued as a hierophany, as nature’s representation of the female body:
the fjord is the narrow birth canal between the woman’s thighs—that
is the hillsides—and the water of life is streaming from above—from
the very habitat of the red deer. And in clear view from the enclosed
Vingen space is Hornelen, its peak—almost like a phallus—treaching
right into the firmament. (Mandt 2001, 306)

I sent Dr. Mandt a draft of this chapter, which was based on this description,
and she replied with additional details about the site that fit my initial list of
landscape features often important in siting rock art: a scree slope riddled with
passages between boulders that one may crawl through, many decorated with geo-
metric figures, and a cavern with a large male figure facing one of the longest
passages; changing visibility of petroglyphs with the sun’s seasonal and daily pas-
sages; and acoustic phenomena: when standing high up among the boulders, one
can hear even low voices speaking far below. All these features suggest a shamanis-
tic worldview and ritual use of the site by individual shamans, by groups using
the place to enact movement among cosmic levels, or both.
Previous researchers interpreted Vingen as a game trap for impounding red
deer and driving them over cliffs into the sea, where they could be killed with
spears from boats. The rock art, then, functioned as hunting magic. This explana-
tion takes into account only the content of the imagery and the juxtaposition of
cliffs with a presumed abundance of red deer. The “fertility elements” here can
be linked via indirect ethnographic analogies to “hunting rituals involving women
and some geometric patterns interpreted as female sexual organs, but central ele-
ments were seen as prey animals, abundance of food, and the psychology of hunt-
ing—uncertainty, suspense, sexual excitement.” The feminine imagery in the rock
art is here seen as by-products of hunters’ psychology, not “social symbols in
their own right” (Mandt 2001, 308). In contrast, Mandt’s gendered landscape
hypothesis “draws attention to the cosmic potential of the entire layout of the
landscape, both on a macro and a micro scale. Instead of seeing Vingen as a
hunting area, I choose to contemplate it as a sacred space, a location where the
160 CHAPTER 8

Fig. 8.7 Landscape with rock art at Vingen, Norway. The phallic mountain peak and feminine
shape of the water-filled cleft (fjord) provide natural sources for gender symbols and metaphors.
Courtesy of Gro Mandt.

three cosmic levels meet, and where the center of the world is manifested by the
mountain peak Hornelen” (Mandt 2001, 307-8; figure 7
Both images and landscapes are gendered, which fits very well with what we
know about shamanistic worldviews and practices: life, death, and rebirth are cen-
tral, and they are expressed at multiple levels of meaning. In this case, the gen-
dered landscape interpretation is not a testable proposition, and few lines of
evidence are available to further refute or support it. I include this example to
show that the gendered landscape model accounts for more features of the rock
art and its setting than the hunting magic hypothesis does and to demonstrate
that shamanistic and gendered interpretations are complementary here, not antag-
onistic.

Hawaii
Gendering landscape in the Great Basin clearly proceeds from a shamanistic
worldview, and similar views may have structured ancient thought and ancient
 SACRED LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPES Lol

landscapes in Norway. Not all cultures take a shamanistic view of the world,
however, and the landscapes of farmers usually differ from those of hunter—
gatherers. Farmers tend to emphasize blocks of land, particularly arable land, and
its ownership, rather than linear trails and passages through the land (Bradley
199%; 6)
Hawaiian rock art illustrates a different kind of attention to territory and to
gendering the landscape. Traditional native Hawatians recognize concentration of
power (mana) in places, as well as in high-ranking people. Mana may be analogous
in some ways to the Numic concept of poha (similar to Hopi powa), but unlike the
Numa hunter—gatherers (and perhaps more like Hopi farmers), the hierarchically
organized farmers of Hawaii expressed concerns with land tenure, kinship, and
social status in their placement of rock art on the landscape.
Petroglyphs in Hawaii are often concentrated in “boundary” areas between
the territories of different chiefdoms, but they did more than simply mark bound-
aries (Cox and Stasack 1970, 31). Ethnographic evidence and distributional stud-
ies suggest that marks were made by travelers as they crossed the boundary, in
supplication of deities; Cox thinks many figures were made by ritual processions
moving between districts for competitive games called malabiki and by processions
of officials who collected taxes.
Many Hawaiian petroglyph sites were associated with the birth of babies. Cer-
tain stones were supposed to alleviate labor pain. Certain places were auspicious
for the birth of chiefs. Petroglyphs include depictions of family groups, birth, and
pregnancy (figure 8.8; Cox and Stasack 1970, 47). Most frequent are simple,
round, pecked holes in the rocks, called piko holes—cupules for placing the umbil-
ical cord or umbilical stump (Lee and Stasack 1999, 9). Piko means navel and
umbilical cord, but the word can also refer to a relative, the genitals, the summit

Fig. 8.8 Family groups in Hawaiian rock art. Drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin, after Cox and
Stasack (1970, figs. 68 and 69).
162 CHAPTER 8

of a hill, the crown of the head, the place where a leaf is attached to the stem,
and many other meanings (Cox and Stasack 1970, 69; Lee and Stasack 1999,
12). Sometimes natural bubbles in lava were modified for use as piko holes. A
circle surrounding several piko holes was said by some consultants to represent
siblings (figure 8.9; Cox and Stasack 1970).
At many Hawaiian petroglyph sites, figures are crowded and superpositioned

Fig. 8.9 Piko holes at Puuloa, Hawaii (drawing by Kelley Hays-Gilpin, after Cox and Stasack
1970, fig. 37). Upper left, a close-up view of one group of petroglyphs (from Cox and Stasack
1970, fig. 95). Courtesy of Edward Stasack and the Bishop Museum.
 SACRED LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPES 163

as later artists worked around and over earlier figures. “At Puako, overlapping of
imagery indicates an apparent lack of concern for what happened to the earlier
images. This is convincing evidence that in such areas the special importance of
a particular space demanded that the images be placed there” (Cox and Stasack
1970, 43). Alternatively, later artists may have deliberately sought interaction
with earlier images and their power. Either way, places on the landscape were
important to parents—why? And what was the significance of the umbilical cord?
Gender in Hawaii is inseparable from landscape. Every act of sexual inter-
course, every conception and birth, reenacts the primordial intercourse between
Heaven (Rangi) and Earth (Papa) from which the gods are born; and the annual
sacred marriage of Lono, the god of the New Year, with “his wife, a beautiful
chieftess of ancient lineage who had been captured by a political upstart to sire
the succession of living kings” (Sahlins 1985, 5). Lono and his wife renew the
fertility of the land through intercourse. Every subsequent sexual act, every con-
ception, and every birth reenact the fertilizing of the land, the conception and
birth of the first humans, and every ancestor since then—from gods to chiefs to
lesser chiefs to commoners, and so forth in a highly ranked but continuous order.
Yet in practice, according to Marshall Sahlins, the Hawaiians’ goal is not so much
to trace descent but ascent, “selectively choosing their way upward, by a path that
notably includes female ancestors, to a connection with some ruling line” (Sahlins
1985, 20).
The piko connects each individual to all ancestors, living kinsmen, and
descendents. Thoughtful placement of the umbilical cord connected the child to
an auspicious future, as well as a distinguished past. In 1779, Hawaiian men and
women in canoes approached British ships off Kauai. The women directed the
men to board the ships and deposit their newborn children’s umbilical cords in
cracks of the ships’ decks (Beaglehole 1967, 1225): “Cook was first thought to
be the god Lono, and his ship his ‘floating island.’ What woman wouldn’t want
her baby’s piko there?” said Mrs. Pukui, a native Hawaiian (Sahlins 1985, 6).
Sahlins explains that Hawaiians could win a connection to land, resources,
and an important social group in two ways: by kinship and by “feeding,” some-
times called adoption, which “may as effectively institute parenthood as would
birth.” Feeding entailed living in a particular territory and eating the food pro-
duced there, long enough to become a “child of the land” or a “native” to a place
(Sahlins 1985, 28). One then belonged to the land and the community that
worked the land. By making a piko hole for a child's umbilical cord in a particular
place, parents sought to augment their offspring’s connections to places and peo-
ple more powerful than they.
Making rock art in Hawaii, then, was connected to “fertility” not just because
164 CHAPTER 8

farmers needed fertile land but because making rock art was primarily about sexu-
ality. And rock art was connected to sexual intercourse not because intercourse is
a metaphor for a trance, as in many shamanistic societies, but because in Polyne-
sia, sex was about the transfer of spiritual power (tapu), the creation of kinship
ties, and the creation of ties to the land. Sex “was a favored means of access to
power and property. Rank and tapu might be gained or lost by it... . Young
chiefs were sexually initiated by older women, preparing them thus for the sexual
conquests that singularly mark a political career: the capture of a senior ancestry.
And all this, of course, was celebrated not only in the flesh, but in dance, poetry,
and song” (Sahlins 1985, 10). Because individuals connect their tapu and their
ancestry with that of others through sexuality, it is reasonable to suppose that the
placement of their child’s piko, and the making ofpiko holes and family images at
particular places on the landscape, had similar intents and effects.
Women, Men, Ritual, and Rock Art 9

cs

ICTURES MAY REFER to the “real” historic past, events in the lives of indt-
viduals, families, and communities, as in Plains biographic-style rock art.
Or pictures may refer to what those with a Western worldview might label
“supernatural” or “mythological” time, such as the Australian “Dreamtime.”
Rock art that depicts or refers to ritual practice may conflate both kinds of time.
Ritual often enacts important events in the past, revitalizes myth, and connects
individuals with ancestors through trance, spirit possession, puberty rituals, and
other life-cycle transitions; it’s therefore often impossible—and should be impos-
sible—to tell whether rock art depicts “real” events and individuals or images of
the spirit world. Gender dynamics pervade debates about the relationships
between ritual and rock art on many levels: researchers’ stereotypes about whose
ritual activities matter; indigenous stereotypes and valuation of gender; the roles
of masculine and feminine personages in myth and ritual; and the importance (or
lack thereof) of gender ambiguity, inversions, and hierarchies.
This chapter explores the roles of gender in some current debates about rela-
tionships between rock art and ritual practice. In Polynesia and especially south-
ern Africa, rock art researchers have debated about the roles of general concepts
such as “fertility” versus culturally and historically specific expressions; whether
individual expressions reflect portraiture, records of ritual performances, or
records of shamanic trance experiences; and whether imagery comes primarily
from myths or from individual experiences. The recursive natures of myth and
ritual, of culture and individuals, and of gender stereotypes and lived experience
complicate rock art studies, but such “feedback” processes are part of what makes
gender interesting, dynamic, and useful for helping us understand art and cultures.

Fertility and Sexuality in Polynesia

Rock art throughout Polynesia may refer to broadly shared beliefs about mana,
tapu, kinship, rank, and sexuality, but different historical and environmental con-

165
166 CHAPTER 9

texts produce a wide variety of expressions in rock art. Rock art associated with
sexuality on Easter Island provides a significant contrast to the Hawaiian case
described in the previous chapter.
On Easter Island, incised images of female genitals, called komari, overlie
images of whales, birds, birdmen, and other much more elaborate figures (figure
9.1). Several lines of evidence suggest they may have been made recently, just
prior to the arrival of Europeans. In sites with multiple layers of figures, the komari
are always the most recent additions. This figure was named and used in Colonial
times: in 1770, one islander drew a komari on a Spanish treaty as a signature, and
portable stone plaques with this design were collected around the same time (Lee
1992, 193). Komari are found in many places on Easter Island, but Georgia Lee
recorded 334 at a particular locality called Orongo, on the island’s western tip,
representing 66 percent of the komari figures on the island. Orongo has nearly ten
times more than any other site, suggesting concentration of whatever activities

cr
20
Fig. 9.1 Komari (vulva) figures, Easter Island. A horizontal boulder in the court at Mata Ngarau
(Orongo) has many komari superimposed over, or closely associated with, birdmen figures. From
Lee (1992, figure 5.15), courtesy of Georgia Lee, Institute of Archaeology, UCLA.
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART 167

were associated with them at this locality (Lee 1992, 64—66). What were these
activities, and who took part?
Lee’s scrutiny of previous interpretations and of the available ethnography
provides several plausible explanations that can be evaluated with archaeological
and ethnographic evidence. First, Polynesians tend to accord a generally negative
influence to female genitals, but they also acknowledged an ability to absorb evil
power. Men might have placed depictions of female genitals on the rocks to
absorb negative influences and help protect the place; in this scenario, women
would probably have been excluded from such sacred places because women were
noa (inferior, not tapu, not sacred). This scenario is plausible, but one must not
accept that this was actually the case, or always was the case, simply because men
in this culture say women were excluded from ritual activities.
Second, men, women, or both might have made the images as prayers for
fertility. Easter Island once had a thriving population, but by the time of Euro-
pean contact, the population had outgrown available resources, and competition
and even warfare among rival clans contributed to environmental degradation.
Scarcity of birds, fish, and arable land led to hunger, infertility, and declining
population. Concern with fertility, of both humans and birds, would be nowhere
more plausible than Easter Island in the 1700s.
Lee favors a third explanation, however, one that does not negate the fertility
hypothesis but clarifies and explains the particular forms of the rock art and its
specific locations. Historic records from several Polynesian islands—including
the Marquesas, Society and Austral islands, as well as Easter Island—trecord a
girls’ coming-of-age “‘clitoris stretching” ceremony. The clitoris, “the favored
organ,” was

tied up with special fibers so that it might be continuously enlarged.

The culmination of this practice was the display of the girls’ private
parts within the sacred confines ofa temple. There the clitoris was first
inspected and measured by a priest, and then, in a public ceremony, the
girl and her age mates displayed themselves to young warriors among
whom they would find their husbands. (Lee 1992, 19S)

In the Easter Island “bird-child” ceremony, girls shaved and decorated their bod-
ies, then stood on a rock where their vulvae were examined by five priests, “who
then carved an image of the vulva on a rock” (Meétraux 1971, 106). Métraux
believed this was a postfacto explanation for the figures, but Routledge (1919,
249) recorded that “within living memory it was the custom for women... to
168 GEAR ERS

come here and be immortalized by having these small figures . . . cut on the rock
by a professional expert.” Routledge also refers to girls’ “portraits” carved on the
rocks at Orongo (Routledge 1919, 263). Because the clitoral enlargement was
recorded from many different islands in Oceania, it 1s probably a general pattern,
and the Orongo narratives therefore probably have some basis in fact (Lee 1992,
195)
In traditional Polynesian societies, as noted in the previous chapter, sex was
central to religion, politics, and the arts. ‘Children, at least of the elite, were
socialized in the acts of love,” and sex was celebrated in dance, poetry, and song
(Sahlins 1985, 10). European prudishness undoubtedly overcame traditional
Polynesian expressions of sexuality by 1900, affecting what anthropologists sub-
sequently were able to record. Lee concludes that komari figures may reflect general
fertility concerns, a focus on sexual pleasure, or both—that is, fertility and sexual-
ity were not mutually exclusive. Ethnography clearly refers to the Easter Island
figures as individual portraits, and because the context and intent of the accounts
is consistent with widespread Polynesian traditions, there is little reason to doubt
these accounts. Thus, a general knowledge of Polynesian ethnography, especially
in terms of sex and gender, helps rock art researchers interpret rock art in specific
cases, yet the rock art of each island differs.

Gender, Myth, and Ritual Practice

in Southern African Rock Art Studies
Gender has troubled the study of southern African rock art for a very long time.
The abbé Breuil, enchanted by copies of aBushman painting he called the “White
Lady of the Brandberg” (figure 9.2), waxed romantic about this “charming girl.”
On visiting the site in 1947, he compared it to a ruined Greek temple. Surely,
“primitive” Bushmen could not have made such refined paintings. Alas, the
famous White Lady of the Brandberg, is neither white nor a lady (Lewis-Wil-
liams and Dowson 1989, 7). The figure has a penis and carries a bow and arrow,
hunting equipment usually prohibited to women, and the white color in no way
indicates European heritage any more than elephants painted red indicate probis-
cidean sunburns. The first challenge for serious rock art researchers in southern
Africa was to demonstrate that Bushmen people were indeed responsible for
sophisticated, naturalistic, technologically intricate paintings. The second was to
demonstrate that the paintings were not childish diversions but were imbued with
religious significance that could be understood via ethnography.
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART 169

V : hj ==
TMS)
Ne NIV, Vip Pos
ee ext ita Ee
el er LINN

ay en \ (hy

Fig. 9.2 The ‘White Lady of the Brandberg,”’ neither white nor a lady. From Lewis-Williams and
Dowson (1989, fig. 2), courtesy of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the
Witwatersrand.

Now that entrenched racial stereotypes have been demolished, at least in the
realm of serious rock art research, gender has come to the fore in the study of
southern African rock art. Gender will probably always play a prominent role as
a result of the recognizable depictions of men and women in many San paintings,
the many important sexual metaphors in related ethnography, and the viewpoints
and political stances of the researchers themselves. Rather than risk presenting
myself as an expert on the art or the ethnography of southern Africa, I shall focus
on the lively debates in the literature.

“Ethnographic Approaches” to Understanding

Southern African Rock Art
David Lewis-Williams’ 1981 book entitled Believing and Seeing presented a detailed
and richly illustrated exegesis of San rock art in terms of the sparse records of
170) GHAPTBRS?

southern San ethnography, records collected from individuals whose ancestors

lived in the area where rock art is found. Some recounted a little about how and
why paintings were made. Lewis-Williams also studied northern San ethnography
and interviewed individuals from the [Kung and other tribes who do not paint.
He contended that southern and northern San share enough cosmological beliefs
and ritual practices that one can draw parallels and use northern San ethnography
to help interpret paintings found far to the south. Gender was a part of Lewis-
Williams’ program from the beginning: Believing and Seeing devoted chapters to the
girls’ puberty ceremony, boys’ first kill ceremony, and marriage, as well as to
trance and curing. Lewis-Williams later noted that the depictions related to the
first three contexts were rare in rock art, whereas trance dance and other trance-
related images were frequent. He therefore emphasized trance as the primary
source of rock art imagery and argued that southern African paintings and engray-
ings are essentially shamanistic; that is, both arise from, and refer to, trance and
the visions and experiences of shamans in altered states of consciousness. Some-
times called the “shamanism model” of rock art interpretation, this model is bet-
ter termed the “neuropsychological model” because neuropsychology is invoked
to generate and test the shamanism model and because neuropsychology can also
be used to understand some nonshamanistic art.
Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson expanded the neuropsychological
model in subsequent publications (Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1989; Dowson
1992), augmenting the earlier emphasis on metaphors and adding study of the
human brain’s universal responses to altered states of consciousness. Their neuro-
psychological model provides the foundations for the most frequent modes of
rock art interpretation employed today, especially in southern Africa but also in
other parts of the world, as outlined in chapter 3.
Many researchers the world over agree that this model is compelling and can
account for much, if not all, of the rock art made by San/Bushman hunter—
gatherers (both terms are somewhat problematic); yet some contend that this
model does not exhaust all the possibilities of studying rock art with the aid of
ethnography. Some explicitly try to infuse research with more attention to gender.
Anne Solomon, John Parkington, and Judith Stevenson have suggested that
because gender pervades San cosmology and worldview, gender must be taken
into account in any study of San rock art. The dialog among some of these
researchers at times approaches rancorous, but it has been almost always produc-
tive (Dowson 2001; Lewis-Williams 1998; Solomon 1992, 1994, 1997, 1999;
Stevenson 2000). As best exemplified in Parkington’s work (1989, 2002), the
argument should not be viewed as one of “shamanism versus gender,” as some
outside observers have framed it; nor can “feminism” and “shamanism” be pro-
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART 171

ductively contrasted (Dowson 2001, 321). Rather, a number of researchers,

including Lewis-Williams, have looked at sex and gender in San rock art in a
variety of ways. By now southern African rock art has probably received more
“gendered” attention than rock art in any other part of the world.
I will examine four of the specific charges Solomon and Stevenson have lev-
eled against Lewis-Williams and Dowson:

I. pervasive androcentrism and inadequate attention to San flexibility in gen-

der systems,
2. inadequate attention paid to gender ambiguity,
3. a focus on the trance experience at the expense of other kinds of rituals in
which gender systems were actively negotiated, and
4. inadequate attention to mythology.

My intent is not to solve these “problems” but simply to highlight some of the
most interesting debates in rock art research today, as well as to demonstrate how
studying southern African rock art with gender in mind has proven particularly
fruitful.

Androcentrism and the Division of Ritual Labor

First, does androcentrism permeate the majority of San rock art analysis, includ-
ing that of Lewis-Williams, as Solomon (1992) and Stevenson (2000) suggest?
If true, this androcentrism could restrict the range of questions asked of San rock
art, bias the data that we record, and color our reading of ethnography. Lewis-
Williams and Dowson responded to Solomon’s charge of androcentrism as early
as 1994;

As she rightly says, rock art research has been informed by androcen-
trism. From Man the Hunter to the artist as “he,” unquestioned assump-
tions have colored research. She argues that it is not merely the
numerical proportion of identifiable females to males provided by
quantification that matters; we need to explore femine |sic] metaphors
and symbols in the context of gender relations. (Dowson and Lewis-
Williams 1994a, 7)

Has treating gender as somewhat peripheral resulted in uncritical expectations

about the relationships between rock art and ritual practitioners? Our culture’s
binary male/sacred/ritual labor versus female/secular/domestic labor dichotomy
predisposes uncritical anthropologists to find the same dichotomies in other cul-
172 (GHIAPTERSY

tures. We may expect rock art to reflect separate gendered spheres based on our
cultural ideals about the division of labor, when in fact the San do not view gen-
der this way. Even feminist researchers agree that San gender ideology 1s binary
as well, with men and women clearly distinguished and ranked (Solomon 1992).
In practice, however, both men and women perform tasks as needed, so activities
are not gendered in a binary framework.
Ethnography suggests that about 30 percent of women became shamans,
including curers, game shamans, and rain shamans, a figure cited by Lewis-
Williams as well as Stevenson and other critics. Believing and Seeing (Lewis-Williams
1981) and Rock Engravings of Southern Africa (Dowson 1992) include accounts of
individually named women shamans and paintings of female as well as male sha-
mans, though female shamans are depicted far less frequently than males, at least
in some regions (Parkington 1989, 16). Ethnographic accounts cited by both
Lewis-Williams and Dowson include women’s participation in making paint and
a story that begins with three girls making paintings of animals. The neuropsy-
chological model for rock art interpretation does not so much depend on whether
rock art was made by male or female shamans or both; rather, it depends on the
common “hardwiring” of the human brain—regardless of sex, the cultural cons-
truals of trance-derived imagery, and the social contexts of rituals and rock art
production. The gendered content of the imagery is more important than “who
made it,” and gender content is more about important metaphorical concepts
than it is about division of actual labor. Indeed, Parkington suggests that “the
painted record may deliberately obscure the ‘reality’ of the economic relations
between men and women and deflect attention from their unequal contributions
to the overall diet,” which is dominated by women’s gathered foods rather than
the more prestigious meat hunted by men and emphasized in the paintings (Park-
ington 1989, I5). Lewis-Williams tends not to engage explicitly with gender, but
Dowson deconstructs gender at many levels, ultimately finding “gender archaeol-
ogy” overly confining and in serious need of theoretical revision (2001). For
Dowson, ambiguity is not simply about unanswered questions; rather, it can be
the point.

The Ambiguous Eland

Have rock art researchers dealt adequately with gender ambiguity in the rock art
imagery? Sometimes male and female characteristics are combined in the same
figure. Sometimes male, female, animal, human physical characteristics are com-
bined. Female personages are sometimes depicted with masculine weapons. Some
therianthropes (human/ animal combinations) have characteristics of exclusively
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART 173

female animals, thus are female therianthropes and possibly female shamans.
Female elephants and female lions appear in the rock art, as well as male animals.
Are patterns significant or merely haphazard? Because sex and gender are so
important in San worldview, language, ritual, and division of labor, Stevenson
reasons that explicit representation of sexed figures in rock art must be important
as well. Further, “shamanic gender contexts may not be a matter of explicit, stan-
dardized, or normative categories in San worldview” (Stevenson 2000, 59). Meta-
phors represent potency and power, and different powers can be deliberately
mixed.
Lewis-Williams and Dowson have noted some of these ambiguities and
accorded special attention to depictions of male and female elands. Of all the
animals that inhabit southern Africa, the eland appears most frequently in rock
art and has received the most attention from rock art researchers. All agree that
the eland’s sexuality and sexual dimorphism have something to do with its domi-
nance of the San graphic repertoire. In most antelope species, the female has more
fat than the male, but this fact is reversed in elands, a gender inversion. Lewis-
Williams notes that in interviewing !Kung San consultants about pictures, “In
sexing an eland they drew my attention to the shape of the antelope’s neck rather
than to the ptimary sexual characteristics, which were, in some cases, clearly
depicted” (Lewis-Williams 1981, 36). Some have suggested that the San viewed
the eland as androgynous or bisexual (Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1989, 122;
Dowson 1992, 109). Pointing especially to eland depictions that combine male
and female traits in single figures (figure 9.3), Dowson suggests that the eland
mediates male and female opposition as the shaman mediates between this world
and spirit world. The shaman, too, may be sexually ambivalent like the eland
when therianthropically transformed (1992, 109).
Solomon points out that in San oral traditions, both the eland and its trickster—
creator /Kaggen, are two gender-anomalous beings from primal times, before
humans and animals were separated. The eland has feminine features—round, fat,
herbivore. While the feminine is usually negative and dangerous, the eland is an
exception. The eland, Solomon suggests, embodies feminine positivity under a
masculine rubric (Solomon 1992, 303).
John Parkington expands the theme of food, sex, and the eland, and he tries
to show that many southern African rock paintings “reflect the tensions of social
and sexual roles in the context of the unfolding life histories of men and women
in a hunting-and-gathering society. The gendering of these societies is achieved
through an extended hunting metaphor that juxtaposes and likens the relationship
between a hunter and the large meat animals with that between a man and his
wife” (2002, 95).
174 CHAPTER 9

Fig. 9.3. Engraving of an eland with both male and female neck, as well as abdominal lines.
Krugersdorp District, South Africa. From Dowson (1992, fig. 158), courtesy of the Rock Art
Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, and Thomas Dowson.

San oral traditions include a number of “early race stories” that take place
prior to the separation of animals and humans. Catastrophic marriages between
incompatible species, especially predators and prey, are a dominant theme, sug- ©
gesting a metaphoric relationship between food and sex. The eland has an impor-
tant role in some of these early race stories. They (and sometimes other large
antelope) are always portrayed in stories as favorite creations of /Kaggen, a trick-
ster—creator figure. /Kaggen confuses sex with food (what should be married,
what should be hunted) in raising the eland and feeding it honey (a metaphor for
sex). Stories recount the transition to modern times: when order is established,
lines are drawn between species; rules are laid down about who should marry
whom and what every animal should eat. Hunters kill the eland without / Kag-
gen’s permission, spoiling it for his intended purpose. Stories clarify what is to
be hunted and eaten, and the result is laying down rules hunters must follow lest
game escape.
The hunter must fight against jfKaggen, the animal's creator and protector,
especially in the boys’ first kill ceremony, during which predator and prey are
metaphorically connected. He must insert poison into an eland with a bow and
arrow, then follow certain procedures, including seclusion in a hut, to make sure
the poison kills the eland and does not “cool.” Only after killing an eland can a
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART VS

boy join the company of adult men, marry, and be a hunter (Parkington 2002,
100).
Likewise, upon completion of the puberty ceremony at first menstruation, a
girl can join the company of adult women and assume the duty of a wife (she
may already be married). In both puberty ceremonies, the initiate spills blood for
the first time and is secluded with strict rules of behavior, without food, and
treated as if ill. The girl, too, is said to have “shot an eland”; she both is the eland
and has shot it, in a similar conflation of hunter and prey. This event includes a
dance, the Eland Bull Dance, which may be depicted in a painting at Fulton’s
Rock (figure 9.4). A central figure lies in a hut, covered by a robe called a kaross,
while women with bare breasts and buttocks dance. They appear to be wearing
tails. A few men stand on the sidelines. The scene fits ethnographic accounts of
the Eland Bull Dance very well (Lewis-Williams 1981, 41-53).
The San do not contrast men’s hunting with women’s gathering, as anthropol-
ogists do. Rather, hunting is contrasted with childbearing to achieve a balance of
authority and a pairing of responsibilities (Parkington 2002, 102). Men insert
poison into game, and semen into women. Pregnancy results from mixing semen
with menstrual blood. Menstruation, then, is a failed kill—a spilling of blood
without effect, which explains why the girl is said to have shot an eland and why
hunters avoid contact with menstruation prior to a hunt. Furthermore, spilling
blood on the ground, whether menstrual blood or the blood of eland, affects the
weather and brings rain because all are linked by a concept of potency, called n/ao
(Parkington 2002, IOI).
How do these concepts appear in rock art? The identification of people with
eland at particular transitional moments—such as puberty, marriage, and
trance—and the identification of the eland as a liminal or ambiguous animal—an
animal de passage (Lewis-Williams 1981, 72—73)—help explain the therianthropes
in rock art, most of which seem to be part human and part eland or thebok
(figure 9.5). First, the images may represent the people of the early race. Second,
they may be transforming shamans. Third, at least sometimes, they may record
language use that intentionally confuses hunting game with marrying women, as
in Megan Biesele’s (1993) Women Like Meat. Women like meat, but they are also
like meat, particularly like the eland after their first menstruation. Parkington
concludes that Vinnicombe’s (1976) description of the San as “people of the
eland” is essentially correct and that for the San, “it seems that all people are
eland in some sense.” Therefore, these are not mutually exclusive explanations for
the rock art (Parkington 2002, 108). Where Lewis-Williams identifies the trance
experience as the source of this metaphor, Parkington emphasizes a gendered
176 CHAPTERS.

Fig. 9.4
wht’
Painting of female puberty rite with Eland Dance? Drakensburg, South Africa. After
Lewis-Williams (1981, fig. 10), courtesy of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the
Witwatersrand, and J. David Lewis-Williams.

“extended hunting metaphor” linked to the nlao concept. The unity of human
and eland is not restricted to the identification of a shaman with the rain animal
he pursues in the spirit world.
Finally, Parkington asks how metaphor actively genders society. What about
the “egalitarian” San? For men, hunting involved excitement, tension, identity,
self-worth, and fulfillment. Were women content to be viewed as “prey ? The
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART 177

Fig. 9.5 Human-eland therianthropes, South Africa. From Lewis-Williams and Dowson (1989,
fig. 306, c), courtesy of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand.

English word is inadequate. San hunters treasured, respected, and identified with
the large meat animals. Large game animals such as eland can be shared, feeding
a whole extended family or more. They are a good symbol of production. San,
then, are comparing women to objects of respect and symbols of achievement.
Women are game, and men are lovers of women, as well as hunters of game (Park-
ington 2002, I16).

Context: Trance, Rituals, Myth

Both Lewis-Williams and Solomon see a wider range of contexts for southern
African rock art than the depiction of trance experience, but Lewis-Williams
believes the trance experience is primary, not only accounting for the overwhelm-
ing majority of rock art images, but also providing the metaphors that influence
the rest. Solomon disagrees with the primacy of trance and suggests that many
features of the art may be related to other aspects of San culture, such as the girls’
Lis CHAPTERS

puberty ceremony, social organization, and the complex of notions and practices
surrounding feminine gender and female sexuality (Solomon $992) Che
“debate” may come down to this: Lewis-Williams allows that the art comprises
different meanings, but some meanings, especially shamanism and trance, should
be “privileged” while others are peripheral. Solomon, in contrast, argues that one
set of meanings, shamanistic beliefs, should not be privileged over others, like
gender, mythology, or formal composition (Hilton-Barber 2001).
Lewis-Williams focuses on the contexts of rock art itself, as reservoirs of
power that can be tapped by shamans. Although the image of an eland can have
many meanings, the position of an eland image on a rock face clarifies its particu-
lar meaning at a particular point on the landscape. Solomon does not focus on a
single context but takes a broader view of ritual practice within societies, includ-
ing gender ideology and gender relations. She considers media apart from rock
art, including oral traditions and mythology, and emphasizes the differences
among images, sites, regions, and historical periods. Although I am sure it doesn’t
always appear as such to the scholars involved, their research programs are largely
complementary, with Lewis-Williams’ emphasizing explanation of the majority
of southern African rock art images and Solomon’s attending to rarer instances
of depictions of rituals other than the trance dance and images that may relate to
myths. Mythical references, too, are rare in the paintings. Mathias Guenther notes
that “To a certain degree the two expressive forms of art (and ritual) and myth
can also be differentiated along the lines of gender symbolism: art is pervaded
with male elements and myth with female ones” (1994, 260). The paintings
emphasize hunting and the trance dance, and they depict mostly men, game ani-
mals, and predators. In contrast, myths emphasize hybrid animals, precultural
times prior to the construction of social and moral order. Protagonists are usually
women or nongame animals, such as songbirds and small invertebrates, creatures
women gather. Many myths emphasize menarcheal restrictions and the abduction
of maidens by supernaturals. They portray women as strong, autonomous, astute,
and dangerous, while men in myths are often dronelike, foolish, and ineffectual.
The performance context may also have been divided along gender lines, with
“man the hunter” also serving as “man the trance artist” (at least predominantly),
and “woman the gatherer” as the mythmaker and storyteller. Only the rainmakers
were all male. Curers and game shamans could be either sex. As many as a quarter
of medicine men among the /Xam were women. A painting of a dance group
that seems to depict predominantly female shamans appears in figure 9.6,
If trancers were also the artists, then women trancers could have painted as
well, and oral traditions bear this out. Just as economic roles were flexible, social
and ritual roles overlap (Guenther 1994, 261). Again, it’s very important to dis-
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART 179

Fig. 9.6 Dance group with female shamans, South Africa. From Lewis-Williams and Dowson
(1989, fig. 18), courtesy of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witswatersrand.

tinguish between gender ideology and the actual activity patterns of men and
women—that is, gender ideology as “ideal representations” that need to be justi-
fied, even if they don’t match real-life conditions. In many cultures, even many
patriarchal ones such as our own and that of the San, women can engage in mas-
culine-gendered activities as a matter of course, and vice versa for men.
Solomon writes that “meaning in the rock art (or elsewhere) cannot be seen
in isolation from dominant social relations; in the San instance, the dominant
relation, as exemplified by the primary division of labor (hunting/gathering) is
that of gender” (1992, 293). Introductory anthropology texts may focus on the
San as an example of an “egalitarian” society with complementary and cooperative
gender arrangements; but gender is a political relation, and clearly men’s and
women’s labor is differently valued in San society. San gender stereotypes portray
male gender as positive and dominant, and female gender as negative, passive, and
inferior (Solomon 1992, 306, 322). Female sexuality is construed as dangerous.
On the surface, this perception would seem to contradict Guenther’s reading of
180 CHAPTER 9

myths as emphasizing strong, powerful female protagonists, but remember that

the myths in question take place in “precultural,” and hence prepatriarchal, times.
The element of danger appears in both myths and present-day gender stereotypes.
Gender metaphors are embedded in San languages, and “to speak the language ts
to reproduce the gender metaphors and the apparently patriarchal discourse
which informs them” (Solomon 1992, 301). Prominent San gender conventions
code round/low/broad/short things or beings as feminine, and tall/narrow/
slender as masculine—for example, the round digging stick weight is feminine,
and the slender bow is masculine. These conventions underlie the feminine—
masculine, blood—water, full moon—new moon, prey—hunter, carnivore—herbivore
contrasts so important in San division of labor and mythology (Solomon 1992,
299),
Almost anything in the San world, then, can have gender connotations, and
all of the really important things do. Attention to ethnography shows that gender,
sexuality, and rain are linked. Both authors agree that the trance dance (figure Oy)
is not the only important San ritual. Social organization, matters of gender and
sexuality, and female initiation ceremonies also appear in rock art (Lewis-Wil-
liams 1981). Lewis-Williams emphasizes the trance dance because it appears to
account for a majority of rock art imagery. The other topics about which Solo-
mon and Lewis-Williams have conversed in print include the eland dance and
female initiation, as discussed earlier, and the importance of waterholes as trance
and death metaphors. Their discussion of these two topics provides contrasting
views of the relationship between myth and ritual and how this relationship plays
out in rock art.

THE ELAND BULL DANCE | As described earlier, the female initiate at menar-
che is confined to a menstrual hut (Solomon 1992, 295-296; figure 9.4). She is
called “the water’s wife,” and she is subject to a number of restrictions, the break-
ing of which may result in her being dragged into a water hole and drowned by
supernatural beings called rain animals (1994, 354). Menstrual blood and rain
are linked because the blood of prey animals is sacrificed to bring rain (1992,
296). The eland is the most important rain animal, so the initiate undergoes a
pseudohunt, shooting a real arrow at a piece of skin representing an eland.
Because women do not usually touch men’s weapons, such as their bows and
arrows, this practice is a gender inversion. Acccording to Solomon, females with
weapons sometimes appear in rock art (figure 9.8) and may thus refer to this
ritual or to myths, rather than to visions seen in trance.
Lewis-Williams, responding to Solomon’s efforts to expand interpretation of
eland imagery in rock art, clarifies his position by noting that he never claimed
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART 181

waa
R

Fig. 9.7 Painting of curing rite with trance dance? Lonyana, Kamberg, South Africa. From Lewis-
Williams (1981, fig. 18), courtesy of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the
Witswatersrand.

that images were made while in trance or that hallucinations account for entire
rock art corpus (1998). He emphasizes the shamanic—shamanistic distinction:
rainmaking by “shooting an eland” was done in trance and is therefore “sha-
manic.” Rain animal paintings are therefore shamanic. In contrast, the Eland Bull
Dance for girls’ puberty ritual is not entirely within the domain of shamans: usu-
ally, while the women mimicked the eland cows, an old male shaman danced the
role of the eland bull and told the girls that the eland was a good thing sent by
182 “CHARTERS?

Fig. 9.8 Therianthropic (human/animal) female figure with weapons. Willcox’s Shelter,
Drakensberg, South Africa. Courtesy of the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the
Witswatersrand.

god. The initiate shoots an arrow at a hide in reference to rainmaking but does
: ; : “ ie Fees)
not enter a trance. Therefore, San gitls puberty rites are shamanistic,” not sha-
manic. The paintings, therefore, are shamanistic as well.

THE DEAD _ Lewis-Williams has identified the frequent supernatural event of

descending into a waterhole and drowning, as a trance metaphor as well as a death
metaphor. The trance experience provides the primary source of the metaphor.
Solomon identifies the death metaphor as primary over the trance metaphor. A
third view might hold that death and trance are layers of meaning that cannot be
pulled apart. Because “death” is a trance metaphor, the distinction is difficult to
sustain (D. S. Whitley, personal communication, 2002).
More important here, Solomon (1994) elaborates on the gender conventions
involved and so expands the theme of death/trance in rock art. “Down” and
descending are feminine. “ Waterhole,” as the realm of the dead and as an obvious
symbol for female genitals, is feminized. Descent into the waterhole ts conceptu-
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART 183

alized as death, reversion to primal states, and as a passage into the past, where
ancestors who are now dead live underground/underwater. They surface to enact
magic on the living. Ascent is viewed as analogous to birth and regeneration. The
spirits of the dead are both human and animal because they are equated with the
people of the early race, prior to the second creation in which humans and ani-
mals became separate. In San thought, women remained closer to animals and so
are closer than men to the world of the dead. Solomon therefore posits that the
therianthropic (animal—human hybrid) figures in rock art are not necessarily sha-
mans in the process of transforming into their animal spirit helpers, as Lewis-
Williams would have it. They are not necessarily the products of hallucinatory
experience but are images of the spirits of ancestral San, of dead shamans, or
spirits who live underground/ underwater/in the past, prior to the human—animal
split. This interpretation does not negate the experience of shamans in trance.
Because San mythology shapes their expectations, trancers believe they travel to
the mythological “past” and the realm of the dead.
The waterhole theme is about life—death transitions—it is about trance death
and “actual death.” Like other maleficent or dangerous beings, the San assign
feminine gender to the underworld and associate it with rainmaking. At birth,
amniotic fluid soaking into the ground creates a nlao child, which may influence
the weather. “Nao is a concept which links female sexuality, biophysiology, and
bodily substances to the weather” (Solomon 1994, 355). In rainmaking the blood
of the sacrificial animal flows on the ground and either transforms into rain or
attracts rain. So the bridges between this world and the underworld—blood,
amniotic fluid, waterholes—are particularly associated with women. Women are
intermediaries for positive results, such as when they intercede to help husbands
get game, or for negative results, such as when menstrual blood falling on the
ground attracts the attention of maleficent beings in the underworld (Solomon
1994, 358).
Lewis-Williams responds that the entrance into a waterhole was often part of
travel through a tiered shamanic cosmos, a point of cosmological breakthrough.
He does not challenge Solomon’s assertion that some paintings may reproduce or
contest gender relations. “But I also contend that belief in a tiered cosmos proba-
bly originated in the universally reported shamanic experiences of moving under-
water or through a tunnel and of flying. That such experiences are neurologically
generated by altered states is incontestable; it is also incontestable that shamans
entered altered states and thus had the potential to experience them” (Lewis-Wil-
liams 1998). Thus, for Lewis-Williams, human experiences in altered states shape
both myth and ritual practice. Trance 1s primary, while gender is “‘penumbral” or
peripheral. He does not question the depiction of spirits of the dead. “For the
184 CHAPTER 9

San, there is next to no difference between dying and traveling in trance. . . . The
distinction between shamans on a visit to the spirit world and those who are there
because they have died physically is by no means clear” (Lewis-Williams 1998).
The depictions are clearly shamanistic, but the question for Solomon is whether
they are shamanic. Are the figures painted in mythical narrative sequences? No. It
isn’t the narratives of myths that are depicted; rather it’s the beings and creatures
in the spirit world, including the spirits of dead people. Myth and ritual are not
separate domains. In a shamanistic cosmos, other realms were accessed primarily
by shamans. The beings and creatures that inhabit other realms are featured in
myths and are encountered in actual ritual experiences.
Solomon counters that stories about the underworld and mythic events were
told to children by their mothers, long-before they were old enough to experience
trance. The stories include equation of death and drowning, they associate death
and water, and so forth. So, ‘‘a trancer experiences and describes what he or she
has been socialized to expect, in terms of cosmography and models of mortality
and illness; mythology provides the material for understanding trance experience.”
The relationship between myth and ritual needs attention, she suggests. “It is as
likely that myth and cosmology inform trance (i.e., that the trancer experiences
what s/he expects, on the basis of knowledge of this lore) as the inverse, that
trance experience permeates the myths” (Solomon 1999). Solomon states that her
model both challenges and affirms the shamanistic model. She acknowledges that
in previous work (such as her 1992 article) she paid too little attention to recur-
siveness, or feedback relations, between myth and ritual. “But even if a recursive
relationship exists, and it must, history, socialization, and myth must be assigned
causal primacy over trance and altered states. These domains are inter-connected”
(Solomon 1997),

Gender and Meaning

Perhaps most important, Solomon asks whether shamanism, gender, or form, in
the art historical sense, are “meanings” that can be ranked in order of importance.
Gender is not the “meaning of the art” any more than shamanism is (Solomon
1999). Gender is not about static male-female oppositions, as structuralists like
Lerot-Gourhan had it. Gender is a mutable social construct, not a product of
deep structures. Gender for Solomon, as well as for Dowson and Lewis-Williams,
is not derived from, or caused by, biology. Gender oppositions in San texts are
gender stereotypes that operate as organizing principles. They occur only in social
practice and often in the contestation of power. Meaning is unstable. Images or
symbols potentially have different meanings for different social groups, particu-
 WOMEN, MEN, RITUAL, AND ROCK ART 185

larly for men and women. Meaning is an ongoing process of negotiation and
semantic possibilities, and all symbols have multiple meanings. This does not
imply that all interpretations are equal, but it does suggest that the data may
support more than one interpretation. Men and women, or shamans and non-
shamans, within the same community may emphasize different aspects of an
underlying logic, such as the shamanistic world. Likewise, researchers with different
values and goals inevitably emphasize different approaches and conclusions to the
same data, with recognition of the same overall patterns and webs of associations.
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Shamans with History ifQO

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AN STUDYING ROCK ART contribute to understanding how gender

arrangements and gender ideologies change or continue over long spans
of time? The best place to try would be an area with abundant rock art, a
well-understood sequence of archaeological cultures, graphic expression in other
media in addition to rock art, and a rich ethnographic record. Siberia is such a
place.
In The Deer Goddess of Ancient Siberia: A Study in the Ecology of Belief, Esther Jacobson
(1993) demonstrates that changing gender ideology can be traced through the
study of rock art with archaeological and ethnographic evidence. Because transfor-
mations of motifs and styles within Siberian art were coherent and meaningful
over time, from the Neolithic to the present, we can reconstruct symbolic systems
by looking at relationships, patterns, and contexts of imagery.
Some aspects of gender have long been recognized as key to understanding
art in Siberia and other regions of Asia, but unexamined assumptions about gen-
der, race, and ethnicity may have led researchers astray. Previous interpretations
of Iron Age Scytho-Siberian art focused on the phallic shapes of Siberian and
Mongolian “deer stones” and the depictions of weapons. Images of deer, horses,
and human figures with rayed heads were attributed to an intrusive Indo-
European male-centered solar cult that celebrated the male warrior as hero.
Gender is the key to Jacobson’s alternative interpretation. She traces a com-
plex web of imagery, styles, and meanings from the Neolithic petroglyphs of
female elk overlooking major rivers, through complex human—animal combina-
tions of the Bronze Age, to the Iron Age deer stones and Scythian zoomorphic
metalwork. In the end, she posits a continuity of belief: from a feminine Animal
Mother deity (from at least the Neolithic period through the Iron Age Scytho-
Siberian cultures) to a religious system focused on individual practitioners embed-
ded in a patriarchal social order and persisting in some present-day native Siberian
societies under a later overlay of Shamanism. Jacobson gives the concept of ‘‘sha-
manism’”’ a history, a face; but she also gives it gender trouble. Following Jacob-

187
135) GEAR TERS 0

son’s lead, I will employ a difference in capitalization to distinguish discussions

of shamanism: specifically, Siberian “Shamanism” will be capitalized; in other con-
texts, the generalized or analogical use of the borrowed term will be lowercased
(“shamanism’’).

Siberia in the Historical Imagination

Entwined birds and deer grace metal horse trappings, cups, jewelry, and mono-
lithic monuments. Horses are buried in deer masks, and both men and women
received rich grave offerings. Iron Age Scythian metalwork and South Siberian
deer stones have captivated the imagination of art historians for decades. Where
did this style come from, and what does its imagery mean? For most scholars, the
history of Siberia begins with Scytho-Siberian nomads, including the Early
Nomads in South Siberia and their Scythian relatives who inhabited the Eurasian
Steppe throughout most of the first millennium B.c. and penetrated the edges of
the Greek and Persian worlds. Many of their successors became incorporated into
states or formed their own states in the first-century B.c., thereby crossing the
threshold of Western history. Often left out of the story are the Bronze Age tribes
who preceded them and who they pushed north toward the Siberian taiga. These
tribes learned to herd reindeer, and they developed the Shamanic rituals that
anthropologists such as Eliade (1964) studied as the prototype for their model
of “shamanism,” now applied worldwide.
Previous frameworks for interpreting Scytho-Siberian art metal work orna-
ments and monumental deer stones were based on the iconography and oral tradi-
tions of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian cultures. These were assumed, not
exclusively by male researchers, to be male- and warrior-centered cultures who
worshipped male sky deities and male tribal progenitors. Marija Gimbutas has
presented Indo-European cultures as patriarchal and ideologically male-centered
in contrast to her construction of Old Europeans (pre-Indo-European) as female-
centered, peaceful, matriarchal, Goddess worshippers (Gimbutas 1982, 1989,
L991),
Proponents of the Indo-European interpretation of Scytho-Siberian art iden-
tify the Bronze Age Andronovo culture as Indo-European immigrants to South
Siberia and argue that this culture influenced indigenous ones. Ray-headed
anthropomorphs in Bronze Age petroglyphs are said to reflect masculine solar
imagery. Some suggest that Scytho-Siberians adopted the deer figure from Near
Eastern sources, then adapted it as a totem of a male progenitor, tribal ancestor,
or male warrior associated with the sun and gold. Some Siberian deer stones were
carved with tools and weapons hanging from belts. As these seem to represent
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY 189

males as hunters and warriors, and as deer are also carved on the stones, some
assumed that deer were signs of warriors.
But evidence of Near Eastern or Indo-European origins for Scythian art is
scant. First, there is no necessary continuity of ethnicity between the prehistoric
peoples of South Siberia and Indo-Europeans or Indo-Iranians. Some archaeolo-
gists and physical anthropologists continue, with varying degrees of success, to try
to divide skeletal remains of Central Asia into Europoid and Mongoloid “types.”
Whether biologically distinct people of this area simply “mixed” for thousands
of years or whether, as I believe, the concept of “race” is fundamentally flawed to
begin with, there is no physical evidence for a significant influx of Indo-Europe-
ans in Bronze Age Siberia.
Second, why would motifs developed in the Near East have meaning for Sibe-
rian nomads, and how would such motifs be transmitted? Why would nomads
be receptive to a masculine/solar/warrior cult? Only later, in the early Iron Age,
do they adopt and emulate foreign objects as signs of wealth. Wealth differences
are not strongly marked in Bronze Age graves, and we have no compelling reason
to think that Siberians would have replaced their indigenous ideology and iconog-
raphy, apart from status competition based on wealth. Therefore, it’s reasonable
to question the identification and interpretation of such motifs as Indo-European
or Near Eastern.
Third, the earliest and dominant animals represented in Scytho-Siberian art
are native to the northern forest and forest-steppe, not to Europe and the Near
East. The Scytho-Siberian artistic tradition probably has a Siberian origin, begin-
ning in petroglyphs and bone and wood carvings, and only later finding expres-
sion in metalwork.
Fourth, the Indo-European interpretation is fraught with unwarranted
assumptions about gender. “It is clear that the archaeological record disputes any
easy association of horse, deer, gold, and rank and gender within the Scytho-
Siberian social order. Equally problematic, | believe, is the addition of a male
watrior association to the solar complex of deer/horse/gold.” (Jacobson 1993,
37). No evidence exists to suggest that the deer is subordinate to the warrior or
that the deer stands for the warrior. The deer is usually depicted as prey, not
predator. “Deer as victim” is an unlikely symbol for a successful warrior. Purther-
more, intact burials show that the deer was depicted on the headdresses of females
as often as males; in addition, females, as well as males, were buried with weapons.
There is no evidence that only men were leaders, religious specialists, or for that
matter, warriors. Sauromatian women served as watriors, priestesses, and leaders.
Herodotus remarks on the important roles of women in Scythian warfare, reli-
gion, and leadership and identified the Scythians as sun worshippers.
190" CHARTER SLO

As Herodotus looked at others through the lens of Greek standards and con-
cepts, he tried to identify the closest Greek equivalent for each foreign deity. For
Greeks, the sun was the purview of a masculine deity and the hearth the domain
of a goddess; therefore, it probably did not occur to him that in other paradigms
it might be logical to identify the sun with a hearth. Such is the case in native
Siberian cultures today, as we shall see. It is a bad idea, then, to impose “male
solarism” on South Siberian traditions. The primary evidence cited for solar dei-
ties in South Siberia are the “sun-head” figures, but since these are probably pre-
Indo-European, and certainly pre-Scythian, they might well be something else.
The rays might represent the sun, but they might as easily show feather head-
dresses. The figures have no indication of sex: they are not marked as male.
In short, the Indo-European-focused interpretation does not work well—
what does work is looking backward at the archaeological evidence for Neolithic
and Bronze Age predecessors and looking forward to the ethnographic record of
probable descendents in Central Asia and Siberia.

Archaeological Evidence
The Scytho-Siberians emerged from a long series of South Siberian cultures in
the area of the Sayan-Altay region and valleys of the great rivers, including the
Minusinsk, Yenisey, and other rivers that flow from mountains in the south to
the taiga in the north. The Early Nomads inherited a number of significant artis-
tic traditions from their Bronze Age predecessors (who may or may not have
included significant numbers of Indo-Europeans), such as east-facing figurative
monoliths; ritual sites with circles of stones or mounded stones and earth; elabo-
rate funerary structures, including log and stone burial chambers and mounds;
and the making of images on cliff faces and boulders. They drew on earlier tradi-
tions of casting bronze and gold in the form of animals. These in turn probably
point back to traditions of carving wood, bone, horn, and antler Jacobson 1993,
21) as early as the Neolithic.

NEOLITHIC The first major Siberian rock art tradition emerges in the Baykal
Neolithic of the fourth through early second millennium s.c. Neolithic people
practiced a hunting economy. In the fourth through third millennia, they pecked
thousands of petroglyphs of elk (Alces alces, which North Americans will recognize
as a moose; figure 10.1) distributed from Lake Baykal and right across the valleys
of the Selenga, Lena, Angara, Yenisey, and Tom’ rivers. Because the figures lack
antlers, they probably represent female elk. Naturalistic and depicted in motion,
they lack association with human or weapon figures and so do not seem to refer
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY IST

d.
Fig. 10.1 Neolithic elk figures, southern Siberia: a, Shalabolin; b, Stone V, Tom’ River; c,
Shalabolin; d, female elk and seals, Second Stone Island, Angara River. Drawings by L.-M. Kara,
after Okladnikoy and Martynov (1972), and Pyatkin and Martynov (1985), from Jacobson (1993,
plate 7e—-h), courtesy of Esther Jacobson.

directly to hunting. Depictions of boats frequently underlie and overlie the elk
figures, suggesting contemporaneity.
South Siberian Neolithic ritual practitioners used petroglyph sites and “sanc-
tuaries’ over and over. Petroglyphs often overlook rivers, “as if the river itself
were a metaphor for significant experience and the petroglyphs were witness to
the sanctification of that experience” (Jacobson 1993, 230). Landscape location
of sanctuaries—including carved monoliths, slab-lined burial chambers, and
enclosures where animals were sacrificed, among other ritual activities—was
important: the natural environment conferred significance on the sanctuary site,
which was in turn activated by human ritual activities and deposits. Mayor Sibe-
192 CHAPTER 10

rian rivers flow from the warm south to the frozen north. Along the Angara and
Lena rivers and their tributaries, Neolithic petroglyphs and ritual sites such as
sacrificial altars are especially associated with cliffs over stretches of dangerous
rapids. The rivers may have served as a metaphor for the path to the land of the
dead in the cold, dark north. The elk carvings may invoke the spirits who guide
the dead to that other world. The boats may refer to the passage of souls in
the company of the elk as the source of life and regeneration (Jacobson 1993,
230-31).
After the third millennium, the elk figure loses its “monumentality,” then dis-
appears by the early second millennium. Different regional styles develop but
retain similar themes, including human as well as animal depictions, horned masks
and horned frontal anthropomorphs, birthing women and bird women (see also
Jacobson 1997, 2001).

BRONZE AGE Metalwork first appears in South Siberia, with copper working
between 2500 and 1500 B.c., followed by bronze working. Late Neolithic and
Early Bronze Age people practiced a mix of hunting and pastoralism; they were
the first to bury their dead in chambers in mounds, called kurgans. Some archaeolo-
gists have interpreted the Early Bronze Age Afanasevo culture as Indo-Iranian and
Europoid, while others suggest a mix of people who did not necessarily have
linguistic or biological ties to Europe. The Okunev culture has been identified as
primarily “Mongoloid,” but the relationship among Late Neolithic/Early Bronze
cultures is unclear; and perhaps more important, the whole concept of “racial”
groups is extremely problematic and must be scrutinized just as carefully as the
concepts of sex and gender.
Okunev people of the late third or carly second millennium B.c. in the Minus-
insk Basin began a long-lived, and ultimately widespread, tradition of east-facing
carved monoliths. Carvings on Minusinsk stelae combine human and animal ele-
ments (figure 10.2). Some female bodies with breasts and full bellies have elk and
ram heads above a mask and some wear bovine horns. These cow—bird women
combine features of animals and humans, and are stylized and unrealistic, unlike
the earlier, naturalistic female elk figures (Jacobson 1993, E13)
Bronze Age people placed ritual sites in valleys surrounded by mountains, and
although rivers flow through these valleys, the carved monoliths always face east.
The shift in orientation from ritual sites that face rivers to monuments that face
east suggests that if the passage to another world in the Neolithic referred to
certain rivers, for Bronze Age people, this passage was instead oriented with refer-
ence to a larger universe. Perhaps this shift can be explained by a transition: from
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY 102)5}

Fig. 10.2 Bronze Age or Aeneolithic masks with animal features, Minusinsk Basin: a, said to be
from Sartygoy; b, region of Erbin; c, unknown site; d, elk-headed stone found in a Tagar burial
site near Erbin. Drawings by L.-M. Kara, after Kyrzlasov (1986) and Vadetskaya et al. (1980), from
Jacobson (1993, pl. 11f, c, b; and pl. 10d), courtesy of Esther Jacobson.

the dependency on hunting and fishing to the dependency on the livestock pas-
tured in valleys and mountains and the water flowing out of the mountains.
Mountains became the loci of helping spirits and the source of each lineage’s life
and well-being. Instead of the river, the vertical monolith, or stela, became an
important metaphor for the layered structure of the world at this time, and this
association persisted for many eras. Although female quadrupeds continued to be
194 CHAPTER 10

a source of central images and although the stelae face east throughout the Bronze
and Iron ages, the specific images carved on the stones changed. Other images on
stone were oriented not to the landscape or cardinal directions but toward indi-
vidual human bodies in graves. One of the richest sources of chronological and
iconographic evidence from this period is the Karokol burial slabs. Used and
reused in slab-lined burial chambers, the stones had been inverted, reversed, and
reworked with successive layers of painted and engraved images. Layers might be
separated by many generations or by shorter periods of time as the slabs were
reworked and reused. The lowest, earliest layer consists of elk images. The next
layer features anthropomorphs with horns, possible masks, and rayed heads, per-
haps “feathered” headdresses. Significantly, no sex is indicated on the Karokol
figures, indicating “either that there was no sexuality associated with these non-
human beings or that they were understood as female” (Jacobson 1993, 100).
Images rarely contain any indication of sex during this period, except for the
presence and absence of antlers on elk. In some areas, however, frontally posed
female anthropomorphs have string skirts and/or a pubic area clearly indicated.
These have birdlike three-clawed hands and small heads. Sometimes they have
horns or antlers, perhaps signifying a conflated male and female progenitor
(Jacobson 1993, 102).
By the middle of the second millennium ..c., Bronze Age cultures, including
the Andronovo culture, herded and bred livestock such as sheep and cattle. Some
cultivated crops, and some supplemented meat from domesticated animals by
hunting. They buried their dead in individual graves, usually inside chambers in
mounds. Some groups maintained a great deal of cultural interchange, trade, and
population movement with other regions, including Shang China. Some used cat-
tle for traction, and sheep and horses for food. Notably, everyone received grave
goods at death and burial, regardless of age or sex. Bronze weapons found in
graves often include knives and daggers with terminals in the shapes of deer, elk,
and horned animals.
Art of the second and early first millennium B.c. revitalizes realism. Petro-
glyphs of this era depict cattle, deer, carts, and figures in mushroom-shaped hats,
often depicted in groups, perhaps dancing or engaged in some other ritual activity.
Some have erect phalluses, weapons, or both, and some figures with hats are
“crouching as if giving birth.” Hunting themes are frequent where hunting
remained an important part of the economy. Combat scenes are rare. Jacobson
notes that the human and bovine images seem to refer to culture, society, and
pastoralism, while contemporaneous deer images refer to the taiga “as literal and
figurative source of being and sustenance,” and “at times those two spheres were
joined, as in the syncretic deer-cattle figures” (1993, 124). Apparently:
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY 195

Within Bronze Age South Siberia a series of symbolic transformations

occurred indicative of the essential transformations of underlying
myth. The female elk image had long since been discarded, and the
female mask——quasi-human, quasi-animal—had also been left behind,
as were the curious bird-women recorded in petroglyphs along the
Chuluut and Chuya rivers. These female images were replaced in
Bronze Age petroglyphs by images of antlered deer, bovines, and
horned and hatted figures. (Jacobson 1993, 234)

IRON AGE The “deer stones” of South Siberia and Mongolia appear around
1000 B.c., made by the Iron Age Early Nomads and their relatives. Deer stones
are vertically oriented monoliths with multiple depictions of deer, wrapping
around the central axis of the stone (figure 10.3).
They bear late versions of an image that appeared in petroglyphs of South
Siberia and Mongolia in the late Bronze Age (1993, 141). Deer bodies are elon-

Ss
<
x
¥
Fig. 19.3 Iron Age deer stone, Transbaykal-Mongolian type, Ushkiin-Uver, Hoévsgdl Aymag.
Drawing by L.-M. Kara, from Jacobson (1993, pl. 19a), courtesy of Esther Jacobson.
196 CHAPTER 10

gated, their legs small, and their heads beaklike and usually antlered. Some stones
bear depictions of cattle, and some have combined features of bovines, deer, and
caprids, such as “deer-cattle,” with cow bodies and deer antlers. Apart from the
antlers, they bear no other indication of sex. If they are reindeer, they could be
either sex, and perhaps in most cases sex didn’t matter to the artist.
The stones themselves seem to refer to men or masculine roles. Some have
weapons and tools carved on them, as if hanging from an encircling belt, and
some have possible necklaces and other ornaments, suggesting the stone repre-
sents a human body, wrapped round with a deer. Deer stones are associated with
slab graves, kurgans, and khereksur—structures with sacrificial altars, often con-
taining burned animal bone. Like the earlier Bronze Age—carved stone monoliths,
deer stones face east. Some stones were broken, perhaps deliberately, then reused.
The deer stones of South Siberia and Mongolia appear to be the source of
the Scytho-Siberian style that includes Scythian gold work and Early Nomad
grave regalia and tattoos. Some of these peoples emulated Near Eastern and Hel-
lenic tastes, especially in deploying increasingly realistic and anthropomorphized
modes of depiction, and even in adding images of non-Siberian animals such as
lions; however, the meaning is rooted in Siberian traditions, not Near Eastern
ones. Scythian images of deer twisted, as if in death around a central axis; stelae
carved with masculine imagery; and bodies wrapped round in tattoos probably
refer not to warfare and human heroism but to the Siberian concept of the death
from which regeneration will emerge.
The cultures of the Scythians and Early Nomads disappeared, or perhaps sim-
ply underwent further transformations, by the first couple of centuries B.c. The
Early Nomads were succeeded by Turkic groups, Mongols, and Siberian groups"
who practiced Shamanism. For clues to the interpretation of Scytho-Siberian and
earlier Siberian art traditions, Jacobson turns to the ethnography of the probable
northern descendents of Bronze Age Siberian cultures and to those who have
preserved oral traditions, rituals, and belief systems that share roots perhaps as
deep as the Baykal Neolithic and possibly earlier.

Ethnographic Evidence: The Ket and Evenk

The ancestors of some of the people who now herd reindeer on the northern
taiga were probably pushed out of southern Siberia during the Bronze Age. For
example, the Tagar culture emerged in South Siberia in the eighth century B.C.
and was contemporaneous with, and related to, Early Nomads. Archaeological
evidence shows that they buried their dead, both females and males, with bronze
plaques depicting deer. The Tagar were probably pushed north along the Yenisey
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY OY

Raver by the Huns several centuries later and may be ancestral to the present-day
Ket, for whom we have ethnographic records.
Siberian cultures have not remained frozen like the tundra of their northern
boundaries. They have changed, adapting old practices into new frameworks in
response to social change and adopting new ideas from outsiders, such as Lama-
ism. Jacobson writes that “To be useful, the ethnography of Siberia, like its
archaeology, must be divided and organized: according to space, time, and the
larger context of artifact and belief. It must be considered, in other words, accord-
ing to its own ecology” (1993, 171). Of all Siberian tribes, the Ket and Evenk
are most clearly related to the Early Nomads. Their mythology emphasizes lay-
ered worlds, the importance of originating places of clans, the mistresses of the
hearth, the clan, and the world; and it includes the concept of cow elk, or wild
cow reindeer, as important and ambivalent sources of life and death.
The primary difficulty with using Siberian ethnography, Jacobson finds, is
that studies of traditional Siberian peoples focus on Shamanism, which in the
strict sense of the term is only one facet in a complicated tangle of ritual practices.
She instead looks at Ket and Evenk myths as layered, placing some of the layers
in time and some in landscapes. Some of these layers may apply to interpreting
earlier art forms, and some may reveal social changes in gender arrangements.
Jacobson’s task is to “excavate” the ethnographies for evidence of earlier beliefs,
practices, and oral traditions.

HOUSEHOLD AND CLAN CULTS In addition to Shamanic rituals, which

focus on an individual practitioner with the participation of the whole commu-
nity, the Ket, Evenk, and others also practice rituals maintained by households
and clan representatives. Many of these are probably pre-Shamanic. These include
“cults of the family hearth and individual protective spirits, and cults of the spirits
of mountains and rivers to insure good hunting, fishing, or safe passage.’ Pre-
Shamanic deities indicate earlier reverence for Clan Mother, Earth Mother, or an
Animal Mother of life and death. Unlike Shamanism, these are characterized by
direct relationships between individuals and indwelling spirits. The cults are con-
cerned primarily with the natural world and with essential aspects of well-being
within that world: the protection of children, for example, or of household stock;
or of the fire hearth that centers a family’s self-identification. In contrast, Shaman-
ism emphasizes a sort of priesthood—the Shamans—who mediate between
human community and spirit. Shamanism concerns itself with issues of life and
death, such as sickness and the wandering soul, the need to conduct the soul of
the dead to another world, and threats that affect the community as a whole.
Household members who maintain the family cults are firmly integrated into the
198° CHAPTER 10

social fabric, but Shamans usually stand apart: first, by virtue of the individual
crises that lead to their selection; and, second, because their practices can be ditfi-
cult to distinguish from witchcraft. “Finally, while the paraphernalia of clan prac-
tices are usually simple objects which could be fabricated by any knowledgeable
individual, the artifacts of Shamanism are characterized by an unusually rich sym-
bolism of object and image: elaborated through the artistic imagination of the
Shaman, specially fabricated by carefully selected individuals, and consecrated by
elaborate rituals” (Jacobson 1993, 172).

MATERIAL CULTURE The special costume made and worn by Siberian Sha-
mans refers to animals, primarily deer, elk, birds, and bear. The Shaman becomes the
animal indicated by his or her regalia. The ambivalent aspects of a simultaneously
generous and dangerous Animal Mother were institutionalized in Shamanic prac-
tice through the Shaman’s robe, drum, and deer/bird headdress. Shamans needed
all of these to serve as mediator between human and spirit worlds. In song, the
Shaman’s drum is called “an animal steed for his journey.” Skin for a Shaman’s
robe and drum must be obtained from specially hunted animals at locations par-
ticular to his or her kin group. Therefore, the robe and drum refer to the tribal
progenitor. The originating animal was female and “Overarching all the animal
references woven into the materials and imagery of the Shaman’s costume are
specific and general references to the female generative force” (Jacobson 1993,
174). The drum frame had to be made from a living tree. When deer hide was
stretched on this frame, the deer progenitor was joined with the Tree of Life. The
drum, then, is progeny of the Animal Mother and of the Tree of Life, and is the
mediator between the Shaman and the locus of tribal generation. In transforming
into a special animal, the Shaman also becomes the tribal progenitor.
Birds also appear in both pre-Shamanic and Shamanic iconography. For the
Ket, the eagle represents the First Shaman. The swan refers to the warm fertile
south and the return of life, while the grebe symbolizes the cold north and death.
“Shamanism seems to have absorbed constructs which already existed and
through which deer/tree/bird already referred to a tribal progenitor, intercessor,
and the transformation attendant on death. . .. One cannot help but find in the
early images of the deer with bird-headed antler-tines a prefiguration of the insis-
tent Shamanic conflation of deer, trees, and birds” (Jacobson 1993, L/9)e Uhe
difference is that in the early Iron Age and earlier periods, these were the
“deathright” of every member of society, not just Shamans. “At some point
between the early Iron Age and the emergence of a documented Shamanic tradi-
tion, a monopoly over those animal references was shifted to and concentrated
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY 199

within the person of the Shaman” (1992, 172): Everyone’s death journey later
became the Shaman’s spirit journey.

MYTHOLOGY In both Shamanic and pre-Shamanic cults in Siberia, certain

elements suggest sexual and social tension, probably reflecting a shift from female-
centered clan structure to political power reintegrated in a male tribal elite. These
show that the concept of shamanism, applied generally to many cultures with
different histories, has been based on a historic culture with its own history of
gender arrangements. These gender arrangements may not be generalizable, and
they may affect the way we view the context of shamanistic practices and symbols
outside of Siberia. For example, in Siberia, lineage or tribal identity is passed
through the male line, but the sexual identity of the “master” of the mountain
that represents the lineage’s origin varies, sometimes taking the form of a naked
female who approaches the hunter at evening, when he is in the taiga, and sleeps
with him (Jacobson 1993, 181). While similar stories may be rooted out in other
cultures (the Hopi Mother of Game Animals discussed in chapter 7 comes to
mind), contexts differ, notions of lineage origins vary, and different historical
trajectories defy attempts to find any but the most simplistic “universals.”
Most forces of nature and cosmological and landscape features were feminine
in Siberian thought. The Ket saw the north-flowing Yenisey river as a Great
Mother, and its tributaries as lesser mothers or grandmothers. Siberians consis-
tently associate fire with a female protective deity, and the fire in the tent of the
mythical Animal Mothers is likened to the sun. The Ket represented household
protective spirits with female dolls passed down through the male line. Foremost
was the fire, or hearth, spirit—Fire Mother, personified as a beautiful woman
(Jacobson 1993, 186).
The most interesting temporal trends can be teased out of myths about Ket
deities. The male solar deity, Es, reigns in the sky as a supreme being. He ts
associated with the Tree of Life, which is female. The key players in Ket myth
are two female deities, Khosedam and Tomam, and the First Shaman, or First
Man. Tomam personifies the South, birds generally, warmth, and life; and her
bird symbol is the Swan. Khosedam is associated with the North, reindeer, cold,
and death; and she may be represented as a Grebe. While she is the source of
illness and death, her womb is still the necessary passage for rebirth. Khosedam
is the former wife of Es, and she perpetually battles against male gods and male
heroes, especially the First Shaman, Dokh.
Jacobson suggests that at a time when Siberian social arrangements became
increasingly male-oriented, a single feminine deity with roots perhaps as old as
the Paleolithic was split into two extremes, one horrific and troublesome, and one
200 CHAPTER 10

beautiful and theoretically subordinate to a male sky god (Jacobson 1993, 244).
First a unified Mother/life/death figure, like that depicted as a cow elk in Neo-
lithic rock art and in some recent oral traditions, was joined by more particular
cults. These focused mostly on female spirits, which were generative and the
source of death. Examples in rock art from the Neolithic to the early Iron Age
include bird women (Jacobson 1997) and birthing women (figure 10.4; Jacobson
2001) associated with images of animals and hunters.
Later, the unity of the female figure was split in two and deposed by a male
god. Concepts oflife and death were separated and concretely located in Tomam
and Khosedam so that Khosedam could give voice to tensions between older
female-oriented beliefs and practices and more recent male-oriented ones. Ves-
tiges of this female orientation persist in the family cults that are handed down
in the male line. For example, among the Goldai/Nanay, the wooden figures rep-
resenting ancestors all have breasts, even the ones that are male (for a reminder
of how this can work, recall the male Navajo Hero Twins, the masculine Monster
Slayer and the feminine Born for Water).
The feminine character of the land and game animals also persists in Sha-
manic practice. The mistress of the taiga and animals, represented in the form of
an elk or wild deer, and the mistress of the hearth fire, associated with the reindeer
herd and the locus of the clan, imply an earlier matriarchal order in which female
heads oflineage controlled economic resources as well as cult responsibilities
(Jacobson 1993, 189). Shamans, including or perhaps especially male Shamans,
have to negotiate this tangle of gendered pasts.

JOURNEYS OF THE DEAD _ The Evenk and other Siberians who live near large
rivers believe that souls of the dead travel down the river. But this does not hap-
pen automatically. Shamans must transport each soul after getting the agreement
of the mistress of the world of the dead. Once her permission is granted, the
Shaman carries the soul in a birch bark boat, recalling the Neolithic boat petro-
glyphs along the Yenisey and other rivers (Jacobson 1993, 195-96). The Neo-
lithic boats are accompanied not by depictions of Shamans but by female elk.
Although these may represent Shamans’ spirit helpers, or Shamans in the form of
their spirit helpers, which is the same thing, they might just as easily mean that
Neolithic people believed the dead had direct access to the mistress of the world
and thus did not need the intercession of ritual specialists.
The Siberian Shaman’s journey has a gendered subtext. Among the Evenk, the
Shaman travels to a sacred rock or tree, the dwelling of the mistress of his clan
lands, who tells him to visit the Mother of the Universe, the cow elk or doe, who
can release the game animals. The sacred tree grows over (or from) the body ofa
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY 201

| ee (4| cm.

b
Fig. 10.4 a, Woman with bovid, Bronze Age, Tsagaan Salaa IV, northwestern Mongolia (from
Jacobson 2001, vol. 1, fig. 595), courtesy of Esther Jacobson; b, Archer, dog, caprids, birthing
woman or erotic scene, Late Bronze Age, Baga Oigar IV, northwestern Mongolia (from Jacobson
et al. 2001, vol. 1, fig. 1017).

deer or elk, marks the place of emergence, and is synonymous with clan origin
(Jacobson 1993, 193). Jacobson interprets the transformation of this sacred tree
to the central pole of the Shaman’s tent as a wresting away of Clan/Animal
Mother power from female deities and ancestors, and relocation of this power in
the persona of the Shaman (Jacobson 1993, 194). “In the image of a giant cow
elk or cow reindeer, lying under the clan lands, one seems to catch distant sight
202 CHAPTER 10

of the impulses behind the great stelae wrapped in the images of deer, or of the
deer with the bird-headed antler times” (Jacobson 1993, 242) seen in earlier deer
stones and rock art.
In Evenk cosmology, the Cosmic Elk, Kheglen, is a giant cow elk followed by
her calf. They can be seen nightly as the Big and Little Dipper cross the sky in a
great hunt, with a Russian, a Ket, and an Evenk following behind. Each night,
the Evenk hunter overtakes her and kills her, but her calf reappears as Kheglen
the next night; so the cosmic hunt is perpetually repeated. A Neolithic petroglyph
of a cow elk followed by the perhaps later addition of a human figure on skis
(Jacobson 1993, 195) may refer to this story. In an older version of the myth,
Kheglen carries the sun on “her” antlers. A male hero named Main has to kill her
and regain the sun every night. This elk has both male and female characteristics.
It has antlers, but it is accompanied by its calf. This may be a conflation of cow
elk and antlered female reindeer, or it might suggest that all elk, whether male or
female, are in some abstract sense feminine; that is, elk are gendered feminine
for
the hunter. In any case, Jacobson suggests that this story, too, might refer to
developing gender tension or conflict between an archaic female-centered cosmic
order and an evolving emphasis on a male-centered social order.

The History of Siberian Shamanism

and Its Social Context
Various interpretations and time frames for the emergence of Siberian Shamanism
have been suggested, including, of course, the notion that Shamanism doesn’t
“emerge” but has simply always been a sort of ur-religion. Jacobson disagrees and
suggests rather that Shamanism, in its specific Siberian form, coincides with a
shift from matriarchal to patriarchal order (1993, 204). No archaeological evi-
dence for prehistoric Shamanic paraphernalia, such as the drum, cloak, or shaking
tent, has been unearthed, though none would be expected to survive the ravages
of decay. Neolithic through Bronze Age rock art in Siberia lacks the geometric
patterns many rock art researchers (such as Lewis-Williams) attribute to sha-
manic trance, and it also lacks depiction of shamans’ paraphernalia (Jacobson
1997, 289). “Some kind of Shamanism” was recorded in the Turkic period, by
A.D. 568, according to Byzantine records, but simply projecting Shamanism into
the past requires assuming that the symbols manipulated by historic Shamans
meant the same thing in the past. To reaffirm their legitimacy and authority, his-
toric Shamans may instead have appropriated symbols that had somewhat differ-
ent meanings and contexts in the past (Jacobson 1993, 208). As social
arrangements change, so do the contexts of religious practice. Shamanism, sensu
stricto, is founded on the belief that access to ancestors, spirit helpers, or deities
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY — 203

requires a specially chosen intermediary. “The institution of Shamanism thus

implies a willingness to cede power to a single individual.” Some Shamans might
emerge as more powerful than political leaders, so the Shaman is often “set apart”
socially (Jacobson 1993, 207).
In spite of social changes and the changing roles of religious and political
leaders, certain basic cosmological assumptions persisted: human dependency on
animals; understanding of being as essentially transformative; death as a process
of transformation and passage in space and time; and the belief that passage can
be symbolized by a pole, a mountain, or a tree (Jacobson 1993, 210). Archaeo-
logical evidence, including rock art in highly visible locations and grave goods
that seem to have been evenly distributed, shows that all members of prehistoric
Siberian society had access to the passage between worlds. We can see these
beliefs expressed in the arrangement of imagery in earlier time periods, especially
funerary regalia and monuments. Later, only Shamans had access, such that others
require the mediation of a Shaman on their behalf. At this point, these cosmologi-
cal assumptions are no longer self-evident to all persons. Rather, it is the shaman’s
journey that affirms the structure of the universe, including the power of animals,
the potential for physical transformation, and the vertical world axis (Jacobson
1993, 209). Jacobson writes:

it is as if Bronze and early Iron Age beliefs and practices contained the
seeds for the germination of Shamanism. The symbolic and essential
constructs uniting deer, tree, and bird, as well as the understanding of
death as a process of journey and change, were gathered together into
the rituals and paraphernalia of the Shaman: in the deer/robe, deer/
drum, and tree/staff with bird claws. What had been the focus of con-
cern and attention by all members of a social group—the process of
death and rebirth—seems at some time after the age of the Early
Nomads to have become monopolized by s single individual, the Sha-
man, as that figure is defined through modern ethnography. (1993,
ZL)

Because Soviet archaeologists were predisposed to find ancient matriarchies

followed by patriarchal organization, their interpretations should be questioned,
but some of the patterns in their data clearly suggest that social arrangements in
the past differed from the ethnographic present. Pre-Baykal Neolithic burials of
females have weapons (bows and arrows), suggesting to Soviet archaeologist
Okladnikov “a social order which allowed female participation in a broad range
of economic activities and a female pre-eminence within the household.” Large
204 CHAPTER 10

and continuously used hearths were suggested to reflect a social organization

focused on households and their hearth fire, a pattern possibly reflected in the
ethnographic Siberian feminine hearth deity (Jacobson 1993, 213).
The Evenk concept of mistresses of specific places suggests a rationale behind
the persistent marking of specific places with sacrificial altars and stelae through-
out South Siberian prehistory. But as social arrangements change, beliefs may
change; they may stay the same but in subordinate roles; or they simply may be
adapted to the new order. Jacobson suggests, “the Evenk Shamanic cult serves as
a model for processes which may have occurred in cultures across South Siberia:
it reflects a shift in significance from the primary Animal Mother, the cow elk or
cow reindeer, to a preoccupation with the Shaman assisted by now demoted ani-
mal helpers” (1993, 213). The Ket hierarchy of deities, gendered masculine and
feminine, and associated with positive and negative values, respectively,

also reflects an archaeology of belief: a process of demotion, denigra-

tion, splitting, and reassignment of values which ended in the apparent
supremacy of the male god and the assignment of the most powerful
negative elements to a female force. For all the effectiveness of that
process of demotion and reassignment, however, the essential female
aspect of the household cults and particularly of the all-important cult
of the hearth-fire points back to a persistent, generative source which
was female, animal, and the place marker and sign of clan identity.
Jacobson 1993, 213)

Art and Structure: Three Themes

For Jacobson, the relevant aspects of Scytho-Siberian art are not the associations
between deer, horses, sun, and warriors; the associations are between the structure
of the art and the persistent themes that appear before and after the Scytho-
Siberian/Early Nomad period. The meanings of the deer and other key symbols
are accessible to archaeological investigation through a patterned ordering of
images—antlered deer, horned caprids and horses, panthers and tigers, wolves
and bears, birds of prey and waterfowl. These images have appeared consistently
in this area for millennia via rock carvings and paintings, mounds of stone, altars,
stelae including “deer stones” (figure 10.3), burial slabs, burial regalia, recent per-
ishable drums and robes, and oral traditions. The underlying belief systems
change—they adapt to new circumstances, both social and ecological. The mean-
ings and contexts of the deer image changed, as well as its forms. Three primary
themes persist: axial order, predation, and transformation.
A central axis and bilateral symmetry embody the ideal axial order. Images of
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY 205

both predation and transformation are organized around this vertical axis. Artists
consistently paired the wolf, bird, or panther as predator, with deer, caprid, or
horse as prey. The prey that are shown being attacked by predators are never
actually shown dead. Predation had become a metaphor “for the pattern of exis-
tence which earlier had been fully summed-up in the singular image of an elk or
deer” (Jacobson 1993, 240). Likewise, images of transformation merge antlers,
birds, and trees by depicting bird heads and foliage emerging from antlers and by
bestowing wings and antlers upon horses. The vertical axis is implied by imagery
and the way it is placed—bird wings, foliage, antlers, horns, animals bearing ant-
lers, horns, and bird heads. In prehistoric mortuary rituals, all of this was the
death right of every individual, male or female.
The same patterns appear in the ethnography. Among the Evenk, the sacred
tree of the clan, and of the clan’s Shamans, is a necessary prerequisite to successful
Shamanic practice. The Great Elk Mother lies among the tree’s roots. She eats
the soul of the Shaman to be born. The tree marks the place of clan origin,
becomes rooted in the Animal Mother, and marks the point of return and origin
(Jacobson 1993, 243). These ideas are pre-Shamanic and have simply been
adapted to fit the emergence of specialized religious leaders called Shamans.
Before the Shamans, the deer stones (figure 10.3) represented all of this and
hence marked the sacred places of sacrificial enclosure, ritual mound, and burial.
Instead of monuments to individual Indo-European male warriors, “The meaning
of the deer images was, rather, rooted in an ancient identification of the animal
with cosmogenesis and with the source and end of a clan’s lineage. Beginnings,
endings, and regeneration were all associated with this animal, as were the heav-
enly bodies, the rivers and mountains of this world.” (Jacobson 1993, 47). But
that unity lasted only from the Neolithic through the early Bronze Age:

In unwrapping the layers that obscure the image of the deer of the
Early Nomads, one finds that it was rooted in a symbolic system
revolving around the Animal Mother: the “deer-mother” as Tree of
Life and as source oflife and death. Essentially female, it was gradually
arrogated to the male as a sign of his power; with time, however, that
function also disappeared. By the end of the first millennium B.c., the
deer had lost its visual and mythic energy; it had degenerated into
meaningless ornamental scrolls, it had been translated into the image
of awoman, or its absence was indicated only through the presence of
a male warrior. With the disappearance of Scytho-Siberian culture, the
deer was destined to persist only through the Shamanistic tradition of
Siberia and Central Asia. (Jacobson 1993, 47)
206 CHAPTER 10

Previous interpretations of deer stones focused on the assumption that they

represented male warriors, male tribal progenitors, and male fertility. The deer
stones instead are viewed here as male warriors in the presence of an honored
female being represented as a deer. We see this honored female actually repre-
sented as a woman in later plaques and hangings, as Near Eastern tastes influenced
Scythian artists toward greater realism and anthropomorphism. Later figures,
especially those of men holding rhyta, have the same arrangements previously rep-
resented in Scytho-Siberian art by animal pairs. They show males who honor and
a female who is honored. They indicate a female presence, sometimes seen, some-
times not.
Scytho-Siberian horse burials with deer headdresses also become comprehen-
sible by analogy with ethnographic worldviews. Horses buried in deer masks were
“a practical solution to a mythic need: the requirement for an antlered animal to
serve as the dead man’s vehicle” (Jacobson 1993, 86). Historically, the deerhide
drum served as the Shaman’s steed, the feminine animal facilitating spiritual travel
and transformation.

Shamanism: The General and the Particular

Diachronic study of rock art, with iconography in other media, demonstrates that
some of the basic underlying themes of Siberian Shamanism can be shown to
have very deep roots, but many of the details of Shamanic practice and its social
context do not. In particular, the gender dynamics of Siberian Shamanism involy-
ing subordination of feminine spiritual power to masculine ritual practice
(whether practiced by men, women, or third-gender Shamans) is not a timeless,
primordial relationship but a process with a history that was intimately linked
with changing social, economic, and political contexts.
Jacobson, like Alice Kehoe (1996, 2000), has reservations about extending
the term “shamanism” to non-Siberian cultures:

Shamanism functions as a useful catch-all to explain monstrous images

(masks) or funerary rituals and furnishings which suggest a belief in an
afterlife. “Shamanism” is a way of saying that we are unable to recap-
ture the early, primitive belief in a journey to the land of the dead and
in life in the hereafter. The modern perspective has erected “shaman-
ism” as a barrier between “us” and “them”, a sign of unity between
humans and the natural world which can be known only by primitive
societies. (Jacobson 1993, 46) j

I have not adopted such an extreme view here, but I do wish to emphasize the
difference between Siberian Shamanism in its social and historical context as
 SHAMANS WITH HISTORY — 207

opposed to generalizable features of widespread religious practice, such as con-

cepts of a layered universe, individual contact with helping spirits via a journey
to the spirit world or by spirit possession, and altered states of consciousness.
Both generalized and historically particular concepts are useful. A generalized
concept of shamanism helps us understand rock art in many parts of the world,
as Lewis-Williams, Dowson, Whitley, and others have demonstrated (see chapter
9). In addition, asking when and how Siberian Shamanism emerged from an ear-
lier substrate is directly relevant to understanding changing art styles and chang-
ing gender arrangements in one part of the world. Most important here,
Jacobson’s study of the emergence of Siberian Shamanism provides a model for
using rock art to investigate specific gendered histories elsewhere.
Taking Rock Art Seriously I I

es

OCK ART ALL OVER the world disappears every day as a result of vandal-
ism; destruction by roads, dams, and mining projects; inattention from
cultural preservation authorities who fail to stop destruction and vandal-
ism; forest fires; natural deterioration; wear and tear from well-intentioned visita-
tion; continued use in traditional cultural practices of one kind or another; and
reuse by nontraditional practitioners such as “New Agers.” Not everyone views
all of these processes as threats. Some believe rock art was meant to deteriorate
naturally; many support continued use even if images are “damaged” as a result;
and, of course, some feel that the jobs and wealth created by development are
more important than rock art and other natural and cultural “resources.”
On the other hand, people in many nations seem to care more about rock art
than about scatters of potsherds and chipped stone, traces of roasting pits, and
even human remains. When members of the public know rock art is threatened,
many will rally to help protect it. I can’t help but think that if people knew more
about rock art, they'd fight as hard to protect rock art as they do to preserve
historic buildings. Why should people care? Rock art may be aesthetically attrac-
tive and may yield scientific data. It’s a reminder of our common humanity and
creativity and a sign of our cultural differences. It’s a mystery to contemplate, and
it’s a text to be read. It’s a reminder of specific family stories and ties to the land.
Gender, as well, is interesting for some of the very same reasons: we all think we
have gender, but, more accurately, we “do” gender; furthermore, among cultures
and within cultures, we “do gender” differently. It’s a puzzle that can never be
completed, but attempting to fit even one piece into the bigger picture yields
immense pleasure.

Rock Art Research

Thinking about rock art with gender improves scholarship as well. First, thinking
with gender helps redress past gender bias in the practice of archaeology, and it

209
ZO GHAP TERS

demonstrates that gender can be studied as an important axis of cultural differ-

ence, along with age, class, and ethnicity. For example, like many other feminist
and gender archaeology studies of the late 1980s and 1990s, Gina Marucci’s
(1999) study of Canadian Athabaskan women’s ritual sites, described in chapter
6, shows that women as well as men were active makers and users of artifacts and
architecture in the past; that gender is a social and historical construct, not a
universal binary classification based solely in biology; and that examining gen-
dered divisions of labor and space yields more interesting and accurate interpreta-
tions of the past than simply projecting Western stereotypes into the past.
Second, thinking about rock art with gender expands interdisciplinary poss1-
bilities in archaeology. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of rock art
research is the wide variety of backgrounds, viewpoints, and motivations repre-
sented in the growing body of rock art researchers. Regular meetings, symposia,
newsletters, and publications have brought together rock art enthusiasts since at
least the 1970s. Papers with an array of topics and theoretical underpinnings (or
lack thereof) are presented by doctors, dentists, photographers, geologists, chem-
ists, studio artists, elementary school teachers, psychologists, art therapists, and a
dizzying diversity of others. Even the archaeologists and art historians who take
part in these meetings seem to present more diverse viewpoints than one would
encounter at a professional meeting, such as the Society for American Archaeolo-
gy’s annual event.
Several lines of cleavage are becoming apparent, however. Many feel that
recording and preservation should prevail over efforts to interpret rock art.
Among those who choose to attempt interpretation, we find the familiar anthro-
pological interplay between those who emphasize historical particulars and-those
who favor generalizations. I have critiqued the generalizing tradition’s approach
to rock art and to “fertility shrines” and “puberty” rock art in preceding chapters,
and I have presented parts of Esther Jacobson’s and Anne Solomon’s challenges
to the generalizing tradition in the study of shamanism and rock art. I have also
supported the use of generalization, comparison, and broad explanatory frame-
works, such as the neuropsychological model and “natural symbols and meta-
phors,” including those provided by sex and the human body. I have stressed that
the different approaches to rock art and “shamanism” are not mutually exclusive.
Throughout this volume, one of my main points has been that gendered inter-
pretations of rock art, and other image-bearing media, shift depending on the
depth of ethnographic sources used. For example, James Keyser and Michael
Klassen (2001) examined the same hoofprint rock art tradition that Linea Sunds-
trom (2002a, 2002b) studied (chapter 5). Both assign cultural affiliation to
Siouxian speakers and discuss oral traditions. Keyser and Klassen associate the
 TAKING ROCK ART SERIOUSLY 21]

rock art with hunting and fertility in a broad sense, based in a symbolic associa-
tion between the buffalo and women reflected in many oral traditions. But they
have little to say about gender or about the makers as individuals. By using more
specific Sioux oral traditions and history, not all of which agree, Sundstrom attri-
butes some of the rock art to female “other-gendered” individuals who dreamed
of Double Woman. Thus, one interpretation implicitly includes gender as an
abstract concept, a spiritual linkage between bison and human female fertility,
and the other explicitly addresses gender as a process, with making rock art an
active part of performing, or constructing, gender—in this case, an alternative
gender. Including three or more genders breaks the researcher out of the Euro-
centric habit of thinking in two opposing categories, and it explains why the tradi-
tional histories do not always agree. Researcher bias, the biases of ethnographers
making the records, and the individual experiences of their consultants all serve
to produce a record that is equivocal about gender in Dakota—Lakota society at
a time when gender arrangements were in the process of rapid change. Most
important, Keyser and Klassen’s interpretation is not wrong and is not replaced
by Sundstrom’s. One is simply more about similarities, and the other is more
about difference.
Even when all researchers are thinking about gender, interpretations may dif-
fer. For example, from the 1960s through the 1980s, Emma Lou Davis, Charlotte
McGowan, Delcie Vuncannon, and Galal Gough interepreted vulva forms in
southern California and Nevada rock art as an affirmation of female fertility, and
they speculated that the forms were used in girls’ puberty ceremonies (chapter 4).
Their frame of reference was purported human universals about Earth Mothers,
concern with human fertility, and other ideas derived from European folklore.
Recently, David Whitley (2000) points out that ethnographic information,
which has been available but largely unused for decades, suggests that in the par-
ticular Native Californian cultural traditions in question, vaginas were symbols of
danger or negative power. These vulva forms may therefore have been made and
used by male sorcerers. Neither explanation is likely to be correct in all times and
all places. Not only is there a great deal of formal variation in figures that have
been labeled as “vulvas,” but the meanings of similar figures may differ in differ-
ent contexts and in different cultural traditions, even among different social
groups within a community. Hypotheses about meaning and iconography can
rarely be “tested” in a strict sense; but some interpretations are more plausible
than others, and science is not limited to hypothesis-testing regimes. Multiple
lines of evidence, judicious use of analogy, and historical evidence strengthen
inference, supporting some interpretations and refuting others.
ZA GHAR
TE Rea

Ethnography and Indigenous Perspectives

At the International Rock Art Congress meeting held in Flagstaff in 1994, Polly
Schaafsma stressed the need for more sensitive Western perceptions of aboriginal
values in rock art research and in archaeology as a whole (Schaafsma 1997). As
researchers, we are experiencing a shift, she suggests, from a perception of rock
art as a “nonrenewable resource” to rock art as cultural heritage that continues to
hold communicative, religious, and social significance for specific native peoples.
Resources can be exploited or set aside, but heritage is shared to varying degrees
by people of different cultural backgrounds. Heritage is not so easily managed.
Since the 1970s culture resource management in North America has
expanded to include consultation with representatives from native communities,
and many tribes have constituted their own cultural and historic preservation
departments. Legislation such as the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act give
Native Americans additional processes to make claims on human bones and cer-
tain classes of artifacts and to have a say in how sacred sites on public lands are
managed. These laws put Indian people in the position of having to seek scientific
validation for their claims of cultural affiliation, site significance, and even land
and water rights. Consultations about rock art sites have become routine, and
rock art is important in this context because it is something physical and tangible
in a particular place on the landscape. It often can be dated, although with less
precision than many other kinds of artifacts.
Many tribal representatives see rock art as providing validation for oral tradi-
tions, yet some interesting differences appear among and within tribes—including
gender differences. In interviews with Great Basin Numic and Yuman speakers,
Zedefio and others have noted the tendency for some men to attribute rock art
to shamans or their spirit helpers, while most women and some men say “little
people” who live in the rocks made rock art. The former view tends to validate
cultural continuity, while the latter has been explicitly cited by researchers as
refuting any continuity whatsoever. For these researchers, saying ‘little people”
made rock art is a way of saying “we don’t know” or “it was already here when
our ancestors arrived,’ and “we are not culturally affiliated and therefore must
relinquish legal rights to consultation.” A more astute researcher would under-
stand that “little people” may well be a culturally appropriate euphemism, by
means of which women and other nonshamans can safely talk about spirit helpers,
especially in the presence of outsiders. Therefore, cultural continuity can be sup-
ported.
In contrast to their hunter-gatherer neighbors who emphasize supernatural
 TAKING ROCK ART SERIOUSLY 213

beings or the spirit helpers of shamans, Hopt people assert that marks were made
by individual clan members. This distinction is interesting, but because archaeolo-
gists and land managers invariably consult Hopi men about rock art, it may not
be the whole story. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office has had a Cultural
Resource Advisory Task Team in place for over ten years, but no women serve in
this group. Women occasionally have been recruited to consult about pottery,
baskets, and other items but not, to my knowledge, about rock art. A Women’s
Advisory Team has been in the planning stages for two years but at this writing
has not materialized.
Before we push further to obtain Hopi women’s views of rock art in addition
to those of men, it’s wise to ask why Hopi people should care about rock art
research and, specifically, why they should care about a gendered view of rock art.
I have made some preliminary forays into this discussion.
I submit that the whole notion of reciprocity, rather than “fertility,” best
helps outsiders understand Hopi in general and the sexed rock art figures in par-
ticular. Within each clan and each family, men and women have complementary
and interdependent relationships. In Hopi cosmology, earth and sky (feminine
and masculine personages, respectively) exist in a dynamic interpromoting rela-
tionship in which lightning fertilizes earth; the sun warms earth to promote ger-
mination; and the earth gives back crops, wild plants, and game animals. Water
that comes from underground and water that comes from the sky move in a cycle
but not without the prayers of living creatures to close the circuits of reciprocity.
Prayers are productive work, just as much as planting and weeding crops. Smok-
ing, singing, making prayer sticks with “breath feathers” and paint blown from
the mouth are part of the work it takes to move water in the form of clouds and
breath from the earth to the sky (this is not “sympathetic magic” or “bribing the
gods” as some “pop anthropology” traditions claimed). Humans, due to our
moral shortcomings, have to work harder in our prayers and offerings than crea-
tures like butterflies, birds, insects, snakes, and flowers. Humans can enlist the
help of such creatures, and making images of them—as well as of maidens, flute
players, warriors, and hunters—may also be viewed as a form of productive work.
It’s within that context that we should understand the Pueblo concept of“fer-
tility’”’ as well as sexuality. There is a “big picture,” and there is probably an
ancient, common historical root with many other cultures; but the details and
differences will help us use rock art to establish migration routes, clan histories,
and cultural affiliation. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office charges archaeolo-
gists with these goals and research questions when studying rock art. This is what
interests Hopi people, at least the people who the Tribal Council has charged
with overseeing archaeological research. This is how they think rock art research
214 CHAPTER II

can benefit indigenous peoples today. One approach, then, to helping elucidate
clan histories is to study differences among Pueblos, and differences among Pueb-
los and their Athabaskan and Yuman neighbors. Looking at diversity of sexed
figures, such as the flute players and maidens (discussed in chapter 7), makes a
small start in that direction.

Public Archaeology
A gendered approach to rock art research helps put the humans back in scientific
stories, where they have always belonged. Talking about rock art with gender in
mind could help educators and land managers develop educational programs that
promote respect for cultural differences through elucidation of different aesthetic
and symbolic systems. Telling tourists that Australian Aboriginal women had no
ritual responsibilities and did not make or use rock art perpetuates stereotypes
that do not reflect reality. The consequences are real, and they are important.
Those stereotypes may undermine public support for the protection the women’s
sacred sites (Bell 1998; Brock 1989; Stephenson 2000). Telling female tourists
that visiting Shoshone rock art sites while menstruating was (and is) forbidden is
not a violation of women’s rights; rather, it helps Shoshone people maintain con-
trol over their land and traditions, and it teaches respect for cultural differences.
This restriction (which was, in my own experience, presented as more of a sugges-
tion than a demand) also suggests that Shoshone men value both “Anglo” and
Native women as individuals because the restriction is as much or more for the
protection of a woman’s own health and well-being as it is for the protection of
the vision-questing functions of the sites.
When we ask “why” men and women made rock art—or “why” men and
women (and children, for that matter) should treat rock art differently—we open
potentially productive dialogs about all kinds of subjects, moving from things we
think we know to things we don’t know and perhaps never thought about before.
Public interpretation of rock art, and of all archaeological places, should empha-
size specific cultural traditions rather than romanticized generalizations about
sacredness, fertility, and Earth Mothers. Rock art sites draw more and more visi-
tors. Many are exercising an exploratory urge to see new and different things or
to learn about other cultures, but some are looking for landscape connections in
lives largely devoid of identification with place (Schaafsma 1997, 17). Too often,
such “New Age” interpretations only succeed in separating people into nature-
loving “others” without history versus guilty “white” trespassers without culture
(though they be of any color), longing to “get” some kind of nativelike connec-
tion to place and spirituality.
 TAKING ROCK ART SERIOUSLY 215

Rock Art and the New Age

Not surprisingly, many indigenous people say that Euro-Americans have stolen
their land and now they are trying to steal their religion. The distinction New
Agers would like to make between their colonialist ancestors and their own genu-
inely sympathetic and generous selves is all too often lost on their reluctant spiri-
tual mentors. Vendors of New Age metaphysics have already embraced rock art
sites and rock art images that researchers have associated with shamanism, for
example, at the Sinagua cliff-dwellings of Honanki and Palatki near Sedona, Ari-
zona (Peter Pilles, personal communication 1998). Alice Kehoe (1996, 384)
points out that Mircea Eliade’s publications, such as Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of
Ecstasy (1964), give authority to New Age notions of transcendence, archetypes,
and the ability of present-day practitioners to regress to a timeless, “archaic,” or
“primal” state in which humans lived close to nature. New Age fascination with
Native American spirituality by and large follows the European primitivist tradi-
tion, in which Eliade and others reduce present-day peoples to this “primal” state.
This attitude, writes Kehoe, “denies full humanity to the first nations of the
Americas” (1996, 377).
At the same time would-be shamans flock to Sedona, Goddess worshipers
arrive at lan Hodder’s ongoing excavations at Catal Hiiytik in Turkey, seeking
not Hodder’s (1997) scientific minutiae but the Neolithic paintings and sculp-
tures James Mellaart (1967) interpreted as manifestations of a Great Mother
Goddess who presided over a primal era of peace and harmony. Ann Barstow
fanned the flames (1978), seeing the site as a possible inspiration for feminists;
busloads took her up on it (before boarding the next tour, compare Barstow’s
article with Lynn Meskell’s 1995 and 1998 critiques).
Will we also see visitors seeking out North American rock art sites with gen-
der or fertility themes because rock art researchers have interpreted such sites in
universal or archetypal terms? Given enough support and publicity from rock art
enthusiasts, I think we will. Seekers may view such sites as belonging to all
women, past and present, who have a primal connection to each other through
their sexuality or procreative powers. There ts nothing wrong with this when
women make a conscious and personal choice about spiritual beliefs or when
they experience a direct emotional response, particularly in the context of healing
processes. Whatever universal meanings ancient images of women have must nec-
essarily be general and vague because of the wide variety of women’s experiences
and identities across the sweep of time and cultures. But these mages do provide
a wellspring of possibilities for metaphorical thinking in the present. Specific
meanings rest
216 CHAPTERS Ta

= in the mythology, cosmology, ritual, and worldview of the members of the

makers’ culture, which is what interests anthropologists; or
# in the individual emotional response, which should not need historical justi-
fications to be valid and powerful.

Therefore, while I support the women’s spirituality movement's exploration

of imagery and archaeology, I strongly object to the increasing exploitation of
such imagery, especially when it appropriates and commercializes native spiritual
beliefs, practices, and images. Worse, some take the attractive fragments of belief
systems out of their cultural contexts and interpret them in primitivist terms,
falsely attributing qualities of childlike innocence and irrationality to native peo-
ple. Alternatively, while valuing our personal aesthetic responses, we may also
strive to interpret rock art as belonging to the descendants of the Native Ameri-
cans who made it. Viewed this way, the role of rock art for Westerners is as
windows into other cultures and into worldviews that are not the same as our
own.
By minimizing the importance of differences and searching for similarities,
one can easily “discover” human universals. Unfortunately, this approach also
introduces personal and cultural biases that lead one to believe that deep down,
we are all “the same.” In fact, we are not all the same. We may assert that “spiri-
tual growth” concerns all humans (Steinbring and Granzberg 1986) but such
generalizations serve only to gloss over chasms of difference. Nowhere is the dif-
ference between European-American and traditional Native American cultures
more pronounced than in the relationship between humans and the spiritual
world (White Deer 1997). New Age stereotyping of Native Americans, South
African hunter—gatherers, Siberian reindeer herders, and Australian Aboriginals as
more spiritual than other cultures only glosses over vast differences among First
Nations traditions. Comparing the distinct ways cultures produce genders in the
transition from child to adult proves especially instructive. Rock art studies can
offer a great deal by adding the depth of time to studies of these and other mat-
ters—but only if we pay attention to the differences, as well as the similarities;
only if we weigh the importance of history at least as heavily as that of psychol-
ogy; and only if we consider that rock art may not “reflect” cultural norms but
may also include subversions, contradictions, and challenges to norms.

Future Research
My suggestions for future research directions all emphasize multivocality: “many
voices,” reflexivity, and what Henrietta Moore (1994 )has’ called: “a passion for
 TAKING ROCK ART SERIOUSLY 217

difference.” This direction is not the same as radical relativism or “anything

goes.” Data, both archaeological and ethnographic, resist many, if not most, pos-
sible “explanations” for even the most ambiguous rock art image or site.
In communities with recent rock art-making traditions, elders should be inter-
viewed now, before traditions and languages are lost. Men should be interviewed,
and women should be interviewed. Third- and fourth-gender persons should be
interviewed. When possible, interviews should be done in their native languages,
and interviews should be done on site. Discussions about whole landscapes
should be included, not just discussions about imagery. In analyzing traditional
histories about rock art, social scientists must take into account, at a minimum,
the different viewpoints and interests of men, women, and other-gender people;
people young and old; ritual specialists and nonspecialists; and members of differ-
ent descent groups and ritual sodalities.
The experience of the researcher at rock art sites should not be discounted as
merely subjective—that 1s, subjective, yes, but not irrelevant to scientific investiga-
tion nor to writing statements of significance that help land managers protect
sites. The human brain and sensory apparatus is similarly wired the world over
and has been for at least forty thousand years, and probably longer. Besides,
hypotheses can come from anywhere. It’s what one does next that is more or less
scientific.
Rock art research must be multidisciplinary, including anthropologists,
archaeologists, art historians, studio artists, biologists, chemists, geographers,
geologists, historians, linguists, photographers, cultural specialists representing
descendent populations, and potentially many others. Even poets have engaged
with rock art and gender. David Campbell’s poem about a figure whose penis also
represents the mouth of a fish (at the Fishman Site, Beacon Hill, Sydney, Austra-
lia; figure 11.1) challenges researchers to think in new ways about the engravings,
about those who made them, about those who view them now, and even about
those who constructed a garden and sewer trench to sever the fishes’ tail (Stanbury
and Clegg with Campbell 1990, 32-34).
Rock art studies should take place within a broader context of iconographic
studies using many media. These include pottery, mural painting, carved and
painted stone and wood, textiles, basketry, chipped and ground stone, and any
other artifact or ecofact that can be depicted or manipulated to make images.
Patterns in material culture should be examined in the light of traditional histories
and linguistic evidence.
Rock art should no longer be approached as an end in itself. It must be inte-
grated into larger archaeological and art historical studies and narratives. Such
integration will improve rock art research, making it more rigorous and relevant.
Mss (HavaNPIsye IO

Fig.11.1 Aboriginal engravings at Fishman Site, Beacon Hill, Sydney, Australia, with inset of the
Fishman figure. The fish between his legs is nearly four feet long. Poet David Campbell wrote:
FISHMAN
An artist pecked out a man and maybe smiled
As he added a tail to the heels.
The warrior stands with a fish between his thighs—
Perhaps the first pun. The phallus serves for jaws.
Panel drawing after Stanbury and Clegg (with Campbell 1990, 34); detail after Mathews (1895,
pl. 3); poem by David Campbell (1978), reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Australia.

And including rock art will change archaeology and art history. Rock art provides
previously neglected sources of material for chronometric dates; evidence for cul-
tural behavior that is inextricably linked to the places where it was made; depic-
tions of items, people, activities, and deities; evidence for ritual behavior and for
technological practices involving tools and paint; and evidence for cosmologies,
landscapes, and gender arrangements. Working with rock art often forces archae-
ologists and art historians to work together and with other experts, and it may
force them to reconsider their “‘taken-for-granted” notions about what constitutes
“evidence.”
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INDEX
acoustics, at rock art sites, 147, 159
adornment and clothing, 9, 10, 12, 1S, 17—
18, 21, 24, 30; 33, 36—37, 39; 102, 109)
IZ1—22, 128, 136-37, 189, 196
aesthetics, 3, 45, 60, 88, 216
Afanasevo culture, 192
Africa, 31, 37, 44, 61-62, 86, 90, 152, 144,
168—84
agriculture, 8-10, SO—SI, 110, 127, 131,
139, 143, 161
Altamira cave (Spain), 44—45
altered states of consciousness (ASCs), 2, 58,
61, 82, 89-90, 96, 122, 126, 154, 170—
72, 177-78, 180—83, 202, 207
ambiguity, visual, 16-17, 21-23, 25-26, 39,
49, 137, 138, 217, 218. See also gender
ambiguity
American Rock Art Research Association
(ARARA), xiv, 65—66, 69-70, 72, 80,
83, 210
analogy, 42, 45, 50, 52, 56, 80, 157, 159,
206, 211
Anasazi culture, 137. See also Pueblos
Andreani, Lucinda, 146
Andronovo culture, 188, 194
animal-human combinations, 44, 61, 166,
2 Op Loy lt b 18; LOZ, MOSH LOy;
192, 193, 195, 200
animals, 47, 52, 58, 156, 158, 187—20S,
191, 193, 195, 201, 218. See also specific
animals
anthropology, sociocultural, 7, 41. See also
ethnography
anthropometrics. See biometric methods
archaeoastronomy. See astronomical observa-
tion and significance
archaeologists, avocational and professional,
Oy OOnOS; Oia elO
archaeology: methods, 8, 10; practice, 67,
210; public, 214; social, 10
Archaic phase, 21
archetypes, 11, 19, 62, 79,215
Atizonam Oe Ole = iO oe, 5—o)
82, 127—46, 129-30, 135—36, 135-39,
142-43, 213, 215
Arnett, Chris, 119
art: definitions, 44, 88; history, 3, 115, 184,
188, 217
“art for art’s sake,” theory of. See aesthetics
astronomical observation and significance,
65-6, 145; equinoxes and solstices,
76-7; sun/shadow interactions, 75—77,
147, 159. See also calendars
Athabaskan languages and speakers, 119,
210, See also Navajo people and rock art
Australia, 16, 17, 29, 31-32, 37, 44, 62, 98—
101, 103, 148, 214, 215; Aborigines as
inappropriate model for ancient peoples,
44_47, 52, 68, 78, 88, 216
axis mundi, 157—58, 203—4. See also Tree of
Life
Aztec culture, [O8—9, ISI
“Baby Rocks,” 67, 80, 81, 82, 125
Bahn, Paul, 43, 48, 53
238 INDEX
Baja California, 21, 72, 74-6, 74, 76, 90,
12]
Barfield, Lawrence, 110
Barrett, John, 9-10
Barrier Canyon style (Utah), 21
Barstow, Ann, 215
Basketmaker period, 21, 29, 30, 103, 104,
149
baskets, 28-9, IOI—3, 104, 118, 120-22,
124) 1sl=52, 213) 217
Baumhoff, Martin, 113
Béguoén, R., 47
Bell, Diane, 98—99
berdache. See gender, spectrum
Bertsch, Hans, 67, 77—78
Biesele, Megan, 175
binary classification. See dualism
biology, 102, 184. See also sex, biological
biometric methods, 59, 86—87, 90-92
bird-human combinations. See animal-human
combinations
birds, 166, 188, 192, 198-200, 205
birth Gall Ge2onoil=—o2, 35,167. LOONIE
jsysy, fiSyck, UCL, 1S, LS; MSicy, WOR WISE
200-201
birth control, 50
bison (buffalo): in European art, 52; in
Plains art and cultures, 94-96, 97, 211
Black Hills (S. Dakota), 94, 96
Boas, Franz, 110, 117
body adornment and painting. See adornment
body shape and posture, 16, 28-29, 36, S3,
54
body, sex. See sex; genitals
Bohuslan site (Sweden), 23
breasts) lOn 2p 29 =o 2 9= 32 ool lOO}
134,140) Io, 175; 192; 200
Breuil, Henri, 45, 47, 49, 87, 168
British Columbia, 117—20
Bronze Age: in Asia, 187—90, 192-95,
202-203, 205; in Europe, 8-9, 23, 38,
109
Bullen, Margaret, 78
Burkholder, Grace, 75
butterfly hair whorls, Pueblo, 37, 39,
128-39
Cahuilla people, 91, 121-22
calendars, 57—8, 145
California, 67-69, 70-72, 71, 73, 75-77,
80-83, 81, 90-91, IOI-2, II I-17,
114, 121—25, 123, 133—34, 150-55,
Ail
Campbell, David, 217
Canada, 69, 117—20, 210
Canyon de Chelly National Monument
(Ariz.), 27, 30, 135-36
Cartailhac, Emile, 45
Cartesian dualism. See dualism
Catal Hiiyiik site (Turkey), Goddess move-
ment at, 21S
Cave of Life (Ariz.), 77
cave paintings
caves, 87—8, 147, 152; as feminine places,
12, 60, 153; European Paleolithic, 26,
43-62, 72
Chaco Canyon (New Mexico), 3, 37, 78
Chalcatzingo (Mexico), 108
Chalfant site (Calif.), 72, 73
Chauvet cave (France), 44, 50, 51, 59, 88,
90
Chemehuevi people, 76
Childbirth. See birth
children, 7, 59, 82, 87, 90—92, 100, 108,
124, ISI, 153, 163-64, 184, 197
Chippindale, Christopher, 23, 110
Christensen, Don, 83, IOI
Christianity, 33, 48, 98
chronology, 2—3, 68, 102, 212, 218;
ceramic, 136—7; earliest rock art, Austra-
lia, 98; radiocarbon, 135, 156; superpo-
sitioning, 45, 162—63, 191; tree-ring
dating, 137
193, clan symbols, 92, 127, 143, 213
climate, 55, 60, 192
clothing. See adornment
Clottes, Jean, 61-2
colonialism, 120, 163, 166, 215
 INDEX 239

color symbolism. See paint deer stones, 187-89, 195—96, 202,

Colorado, 35, 130 204-205
Columbia Plateau, 91, 111, 117-21, 118, Denmark, 8
124-25, Diaz-Andreu, Margarita, 68
conception, 67, 76—77, 163. See also fertility Dickey, Jerry, 101
Conkey, Margaret, 5, 60, 62 Dieguefio people. See Kumeyaay
Cook, Captain James, 163 Dinwoody style, 155, 156
Coon, Carlton, 112, I15 direct historical approach, 40, 67, 80
copulation. See sexual intercourse division of labor. See labor; food processing;
cosmology, 78, 119, 122-23, 170, 184, rock art, production of; gender, roles;
203, 213; layered universe, 89, 155, 156, tools
FSF, Lady 193, 197=98; 203=207 Dobres, Marcia-Anne, 43, 55, 105
Coso Range (Calif.), 70, 134 doctoring. See healing
Counsel Rocks site (Calif.), 76 Double Woman, 93-98, 211

courtship, 138, 142—4 Dowson, Thomas, 6, 87, 89, 170, 173, 184,
craft production, 8, 93-98, 102—S, 108, 207
III, 118-20. See also tools dreams, 58, IOI—2, 118, 120
cross-cultural comparison, 40, 67. See also Dreamtime, Australian Aboriginal, 13, 7S,
99-100, 148, 165
analogy
dress. See adornment
Crow people and rock art, 23
Drew, Julie, 100
Cueva Halcén (Baja Calif.), 76
Driver, Harold, I1I—2, 121, 125
cultural affiliation and significance of rock art
dualism, IO-II, 19, 23, 40—41, 52—53, 68,
to living native peoples, 212-13
72, 75, 79, 88, 98, 102, 149-52, I7I—
cultural resource management, 212
72, 180, 184
cup and groove style, 67, 71, 80, 81, 82, 125
Cupefio people, 113, 121
Early Nomad culture (Central Asia). See Scy-
cupules, 67, 76, 80, 82, 61. See also cup and
tho-Siberians
groove style, piko
Earth Mother. See Mother figures
curing. See healing
earth, as feminine, 82—83, 163, 213. See also
Cussac cave, 44, 50
Mother figures
Easter Island, 166—68
Dakota and Lakota people and rock art, 5, ecofeminism, 56
93-98, 210—I] education, public, 214
Daly, Richard, 119 eland, 172-75, 174, 176—77, 178, 180
datura plant. See hallucinogens Eliade, Mircea, 75, 79, 188, 215
Davis, Emma Lou, 80, 90, 113-16, ISI, elk (moose), 190-94, 191, 193, 197-98,
PAO 200-202, 205
De Sautuola, Don Marcelino, 44—45 Engels, Friedrich, 48
death, 180, 182—84, 192, 197-200, 203, Engelstad, Ericka, 41
206; and rebirth, 75, 160, 196, 203. See entoptic imagery. See geometric figures; neu-
also mortuary evidence ropsychological model
deer, 32, 34, 98, 156, 158, 159, 160, 187- erotica, 53-55, 54, 58, 59, 62, 78, 85
89, 194-96, 198, 203-6 ethnicity, 2, 4, 60
240 INDEX
ethnography, 22, 65, 79-80, 82-83, 91-99,
IOI, [10—25, 148, 166-68, 169, 172,
197-203; nineteenth century, 3, 43, 45—
47, 67, 88
ethnohistory, 40, 84—S, 122
Eurocentrism, I1, 17, 24, 41, 62, 65, 68, 75,
FOLOS OO sis ONslial
Europe, 38, 43—63, 109-10, I48. See also
Scandinavia
Evenk people, 196-202, 204
evolutionism, 47—48
Ewing, Eve, 72, 7S—76
family, 72, 161, 177, 197
farming and farmers. See agriculture
Father figures (Sky Father, Sun Father), 4,
US, WSS; G3, OV=AOO), QB
feminism, xii, 172, 215; history of, 7; in
archaeology, 4—6, 53, 55, 87, 170; the-
ory, 4-6
fertility, 11, 47, SO, 56, 66, 71-72, 75-76,
83, 131, 140, 145, 159, 165, 167, 206,
211, 213; rituals, 47—48, 50, 57, 67, 78;
shrines, 67—68, 80—82, 210
figurines, 108; ambiguous, 19, 56; female,
19, 44, 49, 53, 55—S6, 60, 82, 86;
First Menses site (Nevada), 153, 154
Fishman site (Austral.), 217-18, 218
Flood, Josephine, 99
flute players, 20, 127, 134, 138, 140, 144,
141-45, 213-I4.
folklore, European, 43, 47—SO, 57, 211. See
also mythology; oral traditions
food processing, LOI, 108, 131-34; bedrock
mortars, 77; grinding slicks and tools, 67,
71, 76, 131, 148, 153
footprints, 59, 90, 94. See also tracks
France, 26, 44, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 62,
107, 110, 148
Frazer, James, 47—48, 78
Freers, Steve, 9O—91
Fulton’s Rock site (South Africa), 175
Gamble, Clive, 60
Garcia, Michel-Alain, 59
gatherer-hunters. See hunter-gatherers
gathering, 82; as women’s work, 28, 153,
WD, WHS, NIRS
gender: ambiguity, 16—18, 23, 156, 165,
171-77, 194, 200, 202; complementar-
ity, 79, ISO-S2, 179; functions of, 7;
hierarchy, 3, 79, 87-88, 108-9, 150,
165, 179, 204, 206; history of concept,
4, 6-7; ideology, 8, 213; linguistic classi-
fication, I, 85, 149; inversions, 123—24,
ISI, 153-55, 165, 180; of researchers, 3,
66; social arrangements and structure, 2,
8, 89, 102, 105, 175, 178-79, 184, 199,
202. 210; spectrum (more than two gen-
ders), 6, 10, 18, 39-41, 61, 89, 137,
152, 200, 206, 211, 217; stereotypes, xi—
it, 2, 4, 40, 52, 55, 58, 62, 65, 68, 78—
79, 87-88, 165, 179, 184, 209-10;
universals, lack of, 7, 10. See also dualism;
labor; sex
generalization, as goal of interpretation, 13,
IEG, PA)
genitals, IS—21, 24—29, 33, 44, 62, 71, 100,
NS MBIA, SIS MSN USS, SS), IG,
167-68, 182; vagina (vulva), 19, 26-28,
27, 49-50, 69-70, 74, 142, 151-52,
156, 166, 166-68, 211. (See also vulva-
form); penis (phallus), 19, 20-21, 21, 23,
28) 2D) 20) 98N997 14, 16, 1.35 loi
43, 156, 168, 194, 217-18
geography, social, 59-60, 82
geological features, incorporated in rock art,
NOS), Ms}, Oo, Hoy OW, HOSTAL, 7S
geometric (nonrepresentational) figures
(“signs”), 44, 47, 52, 61, 71-72, 202
Gibbs, Liv, 8—9
Gimbutas, Marija, 55-57, 188
Goddess theory, SS—S8, 75, 188, 215. See also
women’s spirituality movement, Gimbu-
tas, Mother figures, matriarchy
graves. See mortuary evidence
Great Basin, 28, 147—48, 150-55, 212
Great Lakes region, 69
Great Mural Style (Baja Calif.), 21
 INDEX 241

Greece, ancient, 188, 190, 196 humanism, 5S

Greer, John, and Mavis Greer, 91 Hunger, Heinz, 78
grinding slicks and tools. See food processing hunter-gatherers, 61, 68, 86-87, 98, 147—
grooved style petroglyphs. See tool produc- 48, 156-57, 170, 173, 212; family size
tion and maintenance; cup and groove and fertility, SO, 55
style hunting, 47, 86-88, 111, 120-21, 141,
Guenther, Mathias, 178-79 156, 172—78, 189, 193—94, 200, 202,
Guthrie, R. Dale, 53, 86—87 ANS!
hunting magic, as explanation for rock art,
hairstyles. See adornment, butterfly hair 46-47, 57, 66, 88, 124, 159
whorls hybrids. See animal-human combinations
hallucinations, 61, 181, 183
hallucinogens, 65, 124-24, 147 Ice Age. See Pleistocene era
Hampton, O. Winston “Bud,” 74
iconography, definition of, 10
handprints, 59, 61, 86, 90-91, 94
ideology: definition of, 10, 179; Native
Hantlipinkya site (Ariz.), 77
American, 109, 213; San (southern
Harner, Michael, 89
Africa), 172, 178, 179; Siberian, 189
Hawaii, 16, 27-8, 161-64, 161—62
imagery, definition of, 10
healing, 82, 89, 120-21, 124, 147, 1583,
Indians, American. See Native Americans
£70; 18 215
Indo-European languages and peoples, I10,
Hedges, Ken, 69-70, 80
187-90, 205
Heizer, Robert, 113, 124-25
infertility, 80, 82, 167
helping spirits. See spirit helpers
initiation rituals, 2, 12, 57—60, 91, 98, 102,
herders (pastoralists), SO-S1, 86—87,
110, 153, 155, 174, 180. See also puberty,
193—94
rites of passage
hermaphrodite. See intersex
insects, 142—43
Herodotus, 189—90
intercourse. See sexual intercourse
historic preservation, 209-10
International Rock Art Congress, 212
historical particularism, 13, 110—I1, 210
intersex people and animals, 16, 18, 40, 67,
Hocker position, 28—29. See also body shape
71-78
and position
Iron Age: in Asia, 187-89, 195—96, 200,
Hodder, Ian, 215
203; in Europe, 109-10
Hohokam culture (Ariz.), 32, 34, 36
Hokan languages and speakers, 82. See also
Italy, 38, 148
Pomo, Yuman
Homo sapiens sapiens (anatomically modern Jacobson, Esther, xiii, xiv, 13, 89, 187-207,
humans), 44, 60; Hopi Cultural Preserva- 210

tion Office, xiv, 127, 213 Jochim, Michael, 60

Hopi people and art, 20, 21, 36, 79, 92, Johannesburg Zoological Gardens, 87
P2746, 128, V6, 213 Jorgensen, Joseph, 11-12, 121, 125,
horses, 24, 47, 48, 52, 92, 187-88, 131—32
205-206 Joshua Tree National Park (Calif.), 76, 113
horticulture. See agriculture Joyce, Rosemary, 108—9
Hovenweep National Monument (Utah), 77 Jung, Carl, 75, 78-79
242 INDEX
Kalahari desert, people of. See San
Karokol burial slabs, 194
katsina (kachina), 25, 128, 134, 145-46
Kaytej people, 99
Kehoe, Alice, 89, 206, 215
Keresan languages and speakers, 127, 134
Ket people, 196-202, 204
Keyser, James, and Michael Klassen, 210-11
Knapp, A. Bernard, 6
Kokopelli, 12, 19, 141. See also flute player;
insects
Korea, shamans in, 89
Kroeber, Alfred, ILII—I2, 121-22, 125
Kumeyaay (Dieguefio) people, 70-72, 114
!Kung San people, 170, 173
labor, organization of, 8, 15, 47, 92-93,
IOI—5, 119, 124, 148, 172—73, 178=
S010 M16
Lake Oroville (Calif), 80
Laming-Emperaire, Annette, 52
landscape, I—3, 12-13, 15, 59-60, 82, 99,
147-64, 178, 191-93, 197, 212
Lee, Georgia, 166—68
Leroi-Gourhan, André, 52—53, 60, 71-72,
87, 184
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 98, 149
Lewis-Williams, J. David, 60-62, 87, 89,
169=73; 207
life cycles, 107—9, 165. See also children,
puberty, marriage, death
liminality, 112, 175
linguistic evidence, 123, 131, 152, 162, 180,
ONY
Little Colorado River Region (Ariz.), 20, 21,
38, 137, I41, 142. See also Petrified For-
est, Wupatki National Monument
livestock. See herding, animals
lizards, 25, 100
Lorblanchet, Michel, 62
Ludlow Cave site (South Dakota), 94, 97
Luisefio people, 70, 76, 80, 82, 91, 113,
121-24
Magdalenian period. See Paleolithic
magic, sympathetic, 47, 50, 86, 213. See also
hunting magic
Maidu people, 82
Mandt, Gro, 156—60
Manning, Steven, 29-30
marriage, 132, 137, 170, 173-75
Marshak, Alexander, 57—59
Marucci, Georgina, 119, 210
Marx, Karl, 48
Marxism, 98
masculinity, study of, S—6, 109-10
material culture, 8—9, 15, 44, 198, 217. See
also adornment, baskets, metalwork, pot-
tery, tools, weapons
materiality, 9
matriarchy, 48, 188, 200, 202-3
Maya, bloodletting, 33
McCreery, Patricia, 79, 141
McGowan, Charlotte, 70-71, 211
meaning, 63, 184—85, 209, 211
medicine. See healing
Mediterranean region, 48—9, 68
Meighan, Clement, 65—66
Mellaart, James, 215
MeNStMUAuOMy OOS =O; OO Oy elo—
38, 139, 149, 175, 214; menarche, 57,
90, 93, 112, 131=33, 175; 178. Seevalso
puberty; menstrual blood, 111, 131, 136,
ISI—S2, 175, 180, 183; menstrual seclu-
Ssrony oo, TI, LkS=19 80:
Meskell, Lynn, 215
Mesoamerica, 108, 127
metalwork, 188—90, 192, 196
metaphor, 33, 49, 58, 61-62, 108, 140-41,
145, 149, 160, 169-70, 173-74, 176-
TH NS OMMS2Z192=9852.05,. 210
Métraux, A., 168
Mexico, 108, 134. See also Baja California
migration, 127, 145, 147
Miller, Layne, 72
Minnesota, 94
Minusinsk Basin, 192—93
Mogollon culture, 137. See also Pueblos

Mojave Desert (Calif.), 11-12
Mongolia, 187, 19S—96, 201
Mono Craters (Calif.), 113-14, 114
Montana, 24, 91
Moore, Henrietta, 13, 107, 216—17
mortuary evidence, 6, 8—9, 103—4, 108-10,
190, 205; grave offerings, 93, 109, 188—
89, 196, 203, 204; skeletal remains, 15,
40; grave structures, 110, 190-92, 194,
196
Mother figures, 48—SO, 187-207, 197-99,
204; Animal Mother, 79, 141, 142, 187,
198-201, 205; Earth Mother, 4, 49, 75,
77, 79, 141, 155, 211, 214; Goddess, IT,
48—49, 55—S7, 215; Hearth Mother,
200, 204. See also birth; Goddess theory;
Pregnancy
Mount Bego (France), 110, 148
Mount Shader site (Nevada), 75
mountain sheep, 145
mountains, as gendered, 12, 150, 152, 154,
159
Munn, Nancy, 103
Museum of Man. See San Diego Museum of
Man
Museum of South African Rock Art, 87
mythograms, 52, 60, 62
mythology, 2, 10, 59-60, 63, 75S—76, 165,
171, 178, 180, 183—84, 195, 197, 199—
200, 202, 205
Native Americans, 65—83, 90, 109, 113,
115, 212 See also Pueblo, Navajo, etc.
Navajo people and rock art, 17, 18, 78, 92,
133, 150—SI, 200
Neanderthals, 44
Near East, ancient, 57, 188, 196, 206
Neolithic period: in Asia, 187, 190, 191-92,
200, 202, 205; in Europe, 8, 56, 156,
PAG
neuropsychological model, 60—62, 170, 172,
210
neuropsychology, 55, 102, 122, 170
Nevada, 75, 113, 152-53, 154, 211
INDEX 243
Nevada Test Site, 153
New Age spirituality, 209, 21S—7
new archaeology. See processual archaeology
New Mexico, 16, 20, 26-27, 33, 35, 37, 39,
67, 127-28, 134, 137, 140, 142, 150
‘Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) people, 117—20
Norway, 155-60, 158, 160
Numic languages and speakers, 147, 1SO—
55, 161, 212. See also Paiute, Shoshone
Okladnikov, Aleksei, 203
Okunev culture, 192
Onians, John, 53, 55-56, 87
oral traditions, 13, 28, 36, 75—77, 79, 92—
95, 127, 140-46, 173-74, 178, 196—
202, 210=1)5 207
ornaments. See adornment
Orongo site (Easter Island), 166—68
paint: pigments, 33, I21, 153; preparation,
101, 120, 172, 218; symbolism of paints
and colors, 33, 152, 213
Paleolithic period, 19, 26, 43-62, 46, 48,
S0=51s J 1p 85.58,.90
Park, Willard, 152
Parkington, John, 170, 173—77
Parkman, E. Breck, 80, 82, 90
Parsons, Elsie Clews, 132
patriarchy, 179, 187, 202-203. See also gen-
der, hierarchies
Pauite people, 133, 152
Pecos River style, 21
Penutian speakers, 151
penis. See genitals
Perris area sites (Calif.), 76, 123
Peterborough site, Ontario, 69
Petrified Forest National Park (Ariz.), 25—
Di, 29, 83) ol, On 77, Lae
Pfeiffer, John, 59, 107
phenomenology, 40, 55
Phillips, Ann, 145
pictures, rock art as, 23—24
Piedras Pintas site (Baja Calif), 74
piko, 161-64
244 INDEX

pilgrimage, 92, 147 reciprocity, 150, 213

Pintadita site (Baja Calif.), 75 reflexivity, 9
Pipestone site (Minnesota), 94 Reinach, Solomon, 45, 47
pit and groove style. See cup and groove style reindeer (caribou), 32, 188, 196-97,
Plains Biographic style, 23-24, 24, 92, 165 2O0=2Oi
Plains region, 93—98, 210-I1 relativism, 217
plants, 131, 141, 147-48, 153. See also agri- Renfrew, Colin, 49
culture, hallucinogens rites of passage, 107, III, 116, 119; 127,
Pleistocene era, 45, 55, 107. See also Paleo- 175. See also initiation; puberty; marriage
lithic Ritter, Eric, 80, 90
Polynesia, 160-68 ritual, 13, 80, 98, 196; depiction of, 2, 10,
Pomo people and rock art, 67-68, 70, 830— 78; practice CP LO MIOON IGS eL7 eels:
83, 81, 125 183, 191, 206, 218; sodalities, 133, 146;
Pornography. See erotica specialists (priests), 87-8, 141, 167, 189.
portraits, rock art and figurines as, 60, 86, (See also shamans); women’s sites, 94—96,
165, 168 99, 119, 153—54, 210, 214
Portugal, 44 Robb, John, 109
pottery, 20, 88, 102—4, 104, 127-28, 130, Rochester Creek site (Utah), 72, 73
Ii wse6=s7, 213218 rock art: as “cultural resource,” 209, 212;
pregnancy, 31-32, 33-35, S7—S8, 67, 78, definitions of, I, 3; enthusiasts, 3, 83,
80, 109, 125, 144, 151 215; production of, gendered, 12, 46,
primitivism, 45—47, 52, 56, 68-69, 78, 168, 85-105; site management, 212; technol-
206, 215—16 ogy of, 92, 101; threats to, 209
processual archaeology, I, 67 Roheim, Geza, 47
psychology and psychoanalysis, 47-8, 78, Roman era, 109
98) Lis; S926 Rosenfeld, Andreé, 53
Puako site (Hawaii), 16, 163 Routledge, Katherine, 168
puberty, 57, 66—67, 80, 82-83, 90-91, 93, Rubin, Gail, 6
Dom, WLO=SSmlol=son ly OMios
178, 181-82, 210-11. See also initiation, Sahlins, Marshall, 163
rites of passage Salishan speakers, 117-20, 125
Pueblo Indians, 25, 31, 33, 37-39, 77, San Bushmen people and art, 61, 87, 89,
103—4, 127-46, 213. See also Hopi, Zuni, 147, ISI, 169
Keresan, Tanoan people San Diego Museum of Man, conferences and
Puuloa site (Hawaii), 162 Rock Art Papers, 65, 115
San Luis Rey style, 91, 113
queer theory, 6, 41, 172 Sanskrit, use in coining new terms, 71
Sauromatian women, 189
race, 192; assignment of skeletal remains to, Scandinavia, 4, 9, 23, 37, 41. See also Den-
189; stereotypes, 87, 168-69, 216 mark; Norway; Sweden
Rafter, John, 76 Schaafsma, Polly, 212
rainmaking and rain animals. See weather con- Scienceso, LOsS3n 224 217
trol Scytho-Siberian people and art, 187—90,
rattlesnakes, 80, 121—25, 151-52 195—96, 204

Sedona (Ariz.), 215
Sekaquaptewa, Helen, 132—33
Seligman, C. G. and Brenda Seligman, 22—
23, 91
Serrano people, 91, 121-22
sex: biological classification, 1, 15, 18, 40—
41, 184, 210; definition of, 6-7, 89; dif-
ficulty of depiction, 24; skeletal, 9,
40-41. See also mortuary evidence
sexual intercourse, 24, 34, 36, 37-39, 48, 62,
72, 73, 78, 163; metaphors and symbols,
152, 154, 163-64
sexual repression and prudery, 65, 168
sexuality, SO—SI, 52-55, 57, 110, 141, 164,
168, 178—80, 183, 213; 215
shamanism, general, 6[—62, 66, 69-70,
157-60, 170, 178, 181-84, 188, 206—
207,210
Shamanism, Siberian, 13-14, 187—207
shamans, I2—14, 32, 69, 72, 89, IOI, I13,
165, 170-76, 198—200; definition of,
89, 202-203; gender ambiguity of, 61,
89, 173, 206; men as, 58, 75, 78, 87, 91,
152, 181; women as, 89, IOI—2, 172—73
Shoshone people and rock art, 155, 214
Siberia, 13, 89, 187—207, 191, 193, 195
“signs.” See geometric figures
Sinagua culture, 215
skeletal remains. See mortuary evidence
Sky Father. See Father figures; sun
Smith, Claire, 100
“social archaeology.” See archaeology, social
social categories and identities, 17-18. See also
gender
socioeconomic class, 4
Solomon, Anne, 170—73, 177-84, 210
sorcery, ISI, 198, 211
Souixian (Souian) languages and speakers, S,
93-98, 210—-II
South Africa, 168-84, 174, 176-77, 179,
181—82
South Dakota, 94—98, 95-97
Southwestern United States, 19-39, 67, 77—
INDEX 245
79, 92, 103—4, 127. See also Arizona; New
Mexico; Colorado; Utah; Texas
Soviet Union, archaeology in, 203
Spain, 44—45
Spector, Janet, S
Spencer, W. B. and F. J. Gillen, 45, 88, 98
spirit helpers, 11, 115, 117-18, 120, 123-
25, 152, 183, 200, 202, 207, 212. See also
shamanism; vision quest
St Banka, 22-7391
statistical methods, 52, 86
Stein River sites (Canada), 119-20
Steinbring, Jack, and Gary Granzberg,
LTS=06
Stephen, Alexander, 131-32
Stephenson, Christine, 101
stereotypes. See gender; race
sterility. See infertility
Stevenson, Judith, 170-73
Stevenson, Mathilda Coxe, 67
Steward, Julian, 112-13, 121-22
Stoffle, Richard, 1SI-54
storytelling, 178, 184; rock art as storied, 13,
57-59, 120, 148
structuralism, 52, 98, 149, 184
sun, 12, 76, 144, 187, 189; as masculine
deity, 75, 190, 199, See also astronomical
observation; Father figures
Sundstrom, Linea, 93—98, 211
Sweden, 23, 38
Sydney (Austr.), 16, 217-18, 218
symmetry, 29, 103, 204
‘Tagar culture, 196
Takic languages and speakers, 12I—13, ISI.
See also Luisefio people; Cupetio people;
Cahuilla people; Serrano people
Talayesva, Don, 92
Tanoan languages and speakers, 127, 133
Tanzania, 142, 144
Taos Pueblo, 133
tattoos. See adornment
Teit, James, 112, 115, 118, 125
246 INDEX
territory, 2, 60, 82, 145, 148, 157, I6I, 163,
200
Texas, 21, 33, 134
textiles, 29, 88, 102—4, 104, 217
therianthropes. See animal-human combina-
tions
third- and fourth-gendered people. See gender
spectrum
Thompson people. See “Nlaka’pamux
Tlatilco site (Mexico), 108
tools, 44, 57, 109, 188; associated with
females, 9S—98, IOI, 180; associated
with males, 8, LOI, 141, 194; mainte-
nance and production of, resulting in pet-
roglyphs, 82, 9S—98, 96, 103
totemism, 45—47, 52, 88
tourism, 214—IS
tracks, bird and animal, 49, 94, 95, 1S3—S4.
See also footprints
traditional histories. See oral traditions
trance. See altered states of consciousness
Tree of Life ae, Tree), 116, 157, 198—
201, 203—S. See also axis mundi; cos-
mology
Tre, ID) oe plitay Lio—o6
Turner, Victor, 112
turtles, 155, 156-57
twins, in myth, 75S, 77, 141, 150
two-spirit people. See gender spectrum
Ucko, Peter, S3
umbilical cord, 33, 161-2. See also piko
universals, human, 47—49, 61-62, 67-69,
(201s; SO TIIHI2 Io—L7, 125; 183;
211, 216. See also archetypes; generaliza-
tion
Utah, 16, 20—21, 27—28, 29, 29-30, 33, <
oY FaPa “137, 138, 142, 148, 149
uterus eas 28, 30, 31, 69, 75—76, 140
Uto-Aztecan languages and speakers, 131,
145. See also Hopi, Numic, Takic, Aztec
vagina. See genitals
Val Camonica (Italy) 38, 148
Van Gennep, Arnold, II I-12, 126, 133
Van Rijssen, William, 86
Vastokas, Joan, and Romas Vastokas, 69
Vedda people, 22-23, 91
Venus figurines. See figurines, female; Mother
figures
Victorian sexual mores, effect on research,
65, 86
Vingen site (Norway), 155-60, 158, 160
Vinnicombe, Patricia, 175
vision quest, 91, 93-94, 97, 115, 117-20,
12S
vulva. See genitals
vulvaforms, in rock art, 19, 44, 47, 49, 53,
59=06; 58), 67,, 72, (3, 16, 80; 83. 94;
97, 114, ISI, 153, 154, 156, 166-68,
211
Vuncannon, Delcie, 72, 211
Wardamom people, 99-100
Warlpiri people, 99, 103
warriors, 35, 110, 187—89, 196, 205—6, 213
Water Ghost Woman, 155, 157
weapons, 8, 47, 52, 72, 92, 101, 109-10,
TAT, 142,150, 168—69; 172, 180; 182;
188—90, 194, 196, 203
weather control, 80, 82—83, 89, 124, 144-—
AS, Idd, L75=/6; 178; L80=83
Western United States, 65—83, 94, 110-25.
See also California; Columbia Plateau;
Great Basin; Plains
White Lady of the Brandberg (Africa),
168-69
Whitley, David, 83, 90, 122-25, I51-SS,
ZO Peel
Willcox, A. R., 86, 90
witchcraft. See sorcery
womb. See uterus; pregnancy
women’s spirituality movement, 86, 215-16.
See also Gimbutas; Goddess theory;
Mother figures
World Tree. See Tree of Life
Wupatki National Monument (Ariz.), 35,
38
 INDEX = 247

Wyoming, 35, 39, 134, 155, 156-57
Yakama people (Sahaptin), 117
‘Yates lim 23, 37
“yoni rocks.” See geological features
York, Annie Zetco, 119—20
Yuman languages and speakers, 70—72, 114,
IZ lsO=alee 12,
Zedeno, Maria Nieves, 1S1—54, 212
Zuni people, 26, 67, 75, 77, 127-28, 134,
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Kelley Hays-Gilpin teaches archaeology, ceramic analysis, and a rock art course
at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, just hours from Petrified Forest
National Park and her favorite rock art. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology
at the University of Arizona in 1992, then worked for the Navajo Nation
Archaeology Department for several years. She has coauthored books on prehis-
toric sandals of northern Arizona and pottery of Arizona’s Puerco Valley, and
she coedited the Reader in Gender Archaeology with David S. Whitley. Current proj-
ects include studies of thirteenth- to sixteenth-century Hopi pottery and mural
painting, Chaco Canyon rock art, and Petrified Forest—area pottery.

249
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