The Rock Art of Arizona: Art for Life's Sake

The Rock Art of Arizona: Art for Life’s Sake by Ekkehart Malotki, 2008

Coming across native rock art, intentionally or not, is always one of the highlights of a hike in Arizona. Ekkehart Malotki, a linguist and specialist in rock art who formerly taught at Northern Arizona University and has deep ties with the Hopi tribe, proffers the latest research on, and an interpretive framework for, petroglyphs and pictographs in the state.

He divides rock art into “traditions” by age and style (which more or less corresponds to geographical areas). Unlike historical western art, Arizona rock art evolved from abstract to representational with time. The oldest (archaic) tradition consists of lines, spirals, circles and small indentations (“cupules”) scattered throughout the state. It is usually heavily repatinated, due to its age. Subsequent traditions become increasingly representational and include zoomorphic, anthropomorphic and fantastical figures, while conserving and developing geometric designs.

Interpretation of ancient rock art is highly fraught, given the lack of living interlocutors or a written record to explain it to us. Malotki presents a number of hypotheses that are current in academia. One that seems intriguing at first but, on reflection, is silly. This is that the early abstract figures represent phosgenes: the phantom images that appear on the inside of your eyeballs when you rub them or when you suffer a blow to the head (“seeing stars”). While there may be some resemblance, why on earth would this be the first thing humans would choose to laboriously peck into or paint on rock? Another is that many (most?) rock art represents shamanistic visions generated by any number of means (marathon dancing, sleep and food deprivation, ingestion of psychedelics). This seems more credible, as is the astronomical significance that has been demonstrated for at least a few rock art panels. A third, that many panels were used for hunting magic, works in the few cases where such scenes are portrayed, but they are rare.

There is an alternative, non-academic, school of rock art interpretation that tries to decipher the symbols as a kind of proto-written language or, at the very least, as symbols on a map legend. Malotki dismisses this but, given the common occurrence of certain certain symbols with landscape features, I can see its appeal.