La agricultura fue una actividad fundamental de las comunidades aldeanas de las tierras altas de Arica en los Andes centro sur, durante el período Intermedio tardío (1100-1450 dC), hasta convertirse en uno de los principales propósitos de la expansión inca en la región en los siglos quince y dieciséis. Este trabajo presenta el hallazgo, en la cuenca alta del Valle de Azapa, de maquetas o infraestructuras agrícolas grabadas en miniatura. Caracterizamos sus formas y soportes, examinamos su distribución en los territorios tardíos de la región y las contrastamos a macroescala regional con evidencias similares. Finalmente, discutimos su vínculo con el flujo de conocimientos y experiencias relativos al manejo del agua y la topografía, junto con la ritualización del paisaje agrícola en tiempos incas.

The development of freestanding stone sculpture by the Olmec people of Mesoamerica's Gulf lowlands has long been considered one of the defining artistic achievements of the Formative period. However, by the Middle Formative period the production of freestanding sculpture was often eclipsed by the contemporaneous creation of rock art outside the Gulf lowlands. In this article I argue that Gulf Olmec sculptors and audiences occasionally co-opted the aesthetic and ritual treatments of rock art at topographic shrines to construct and reinforce the sacred geographies of primary site cores. In so doing, Olmec elites converted the ideological power of the wild and the animate earth into a form of political capital.

En este trabajo se presenta el estudio de los sitios con arte rupestre del faldeo oriental de la Sierra de Velasco y occidental de la Sierra de La Punta (norte de la provincia de La Rioja, Argentina). Los objetivos son definir la diversidad de representaciones a nivel local, evaluar la circulación de información a escala regional y examinar su rol en la conformación de paisajes sociales, durante los últimos 2.000 años. Para ello se realiza un análisis de los repertorios iconográficos y de los vínculos entre imágenes y contextos de emplazamiento. Los resultados sugieren que los sitios rupestres distribuidos en altitudes contrastantes implicaron diferentes prácticas sociales. Los emplazamientos pedemontanos, integrados a los espacios residenciales y productivos, se habrían conformado en torno a prácticas domésticas y simbólicas recurrentes, mientras que aquellos situados en las serranías de La Punta estarían vinculados con el uso de vías naturales de circulación. Esta segregación espacial involucra, a su vez, distintas temporalidades para la producción y el consumo de arte rupestre.

Este trabajo se propone avanzar en la comprensión de los procesos históricos de pintado del sitio arqueológico de Oyola (Sierra El Alto-Ancasti, Catamarca, Argentina). En particular, se evalúan similitudes y diferencias en la composición material de las mezclas pigmentarias para entrever la existencia de antiguas recetas pictóricas en la confección de las pinturas rupestres negras. Para ello se realizaron análisis microestratigráficos de 28 motivos mediante microscopía electrónica de barrido con análisis elemental por espectroscopía dispersiva en energía de rayos X (MEB-EDS), y microespectroscopía Raman (RS). Su estudio comparativo señaló el uso alternativo de dos pigmentos negros (carbón vegetal y óxidos de manganeso) combinados, en algunos casos, con un aditivo (sulfato de calcio). De esta forma, fue posible conocer ciertos aspectos de las recetas pictóricas que orientaron la preparación de las mezclas pigmentarias negras, aproximándonos a algunas de las tradiciones y saberes retomados. Para alcanzar una comprensión histórica de dichas recetas, se evaluó la distribución espacial, temporal y algunas características formales de los motivos rupestres realizados con ellas. Al no identificarse tendencias claras, se propone una definición menos normativa de receta pictórica que resalta los aspectos compartidos entre distintos episodios de pintado sin perder de vista las posibilidades creativas de cada evento.

AMS radiocarbon dating has been widely applied in Palaeolithic art research and its value has been proven over the past three decades. Yet it still suffers from issues that need to be discussed and analysed to improve future sampling strategies and strengthen the interpretation of the results. This study presents new AMS dates for the parietal art in Cueva de Las Chimeneas in northern Spain, describes the quality of the samples, and discusses their reliability. The joint assessment of the dates and its comparison with previously obtained dates as well as stratified and dated portable art makes it possible to put forward a hypothesis about the time of creation of the cave's parietal art and the degree of synchrony or diachrony in its production. Consequently, it is proposed that the cave art at Las Chimeneas was created in the lower Magdalenian, between 19,000 and 17,500 cal bp.

We present an AMS radiocarbon date from a bird image in a cave on the island of Hispaniola in the northern Caribbean. Borbón Cave No. 1 contains a key rock art assemblage that likely reflects a significant part of past native Taíno societies’ symbolic thought and beliefs. The grouping has already served to define one rock art style in the Antilles: the Borbón School. Our sample yielded a date of 890 ± 30 BP (1045–1225 cal AD). This result, as well as additional published dates for the region, confirms that these images were created before European contact with the region. Further dating comparison indicates that Taíno artistic traditions persisted for some years after the arrival and settlement of Spanish colonists on the island.

En este trabajo presentamos un análisis zooarqueológico de las relaciones humano-camélido durante el Holoceno en la Puna de Atacama (norte de Chile y Noroeste argentino) a través del estudio de composiciones rupestres interpretadas como escenas de caza durante el lapso entre 9700 y 2500 aP. Estas representaciones aluden a interacciones sociales y a un imaginario visual que vincula humanos y camélidos en un mismo acontecimiento. Planteamos que el estudio de estas manifestaciones pintadas puede aportar evidencia sustancial sobre las características de la caza comunal, la demografía de los cazadores recolectores y los primeros pastores del área surandina. Así, hemos podido identificar con el análisis del arte rupestre, tanto eventos de caza llevada a cabo por grupos locales, como así también cazas colectivas o comunales efectuadas por grupos agregados de población dentro de un ciclo anual o de agregaciones poblacionales extraordinarias. Esto representa un cálculo demográfico efectuado por primera vez a partir de las escenas de caza del arte rupestre.

Este trabajo busca discutir los alcances y limitaciones de la aplicación del concepto de comunicación visual en el arte rupestre. Con este objetivo, se evalúa la presencia/ausencia de reglas de composición en el arte de Viuda Quenzana (Patagonia centro-meridional, Argentina), y se discuten sus variaciones a través del tiempo. Para tal fin, se analizan las características estructurales de las reglas composicionales actuantes sobre la producción de 367 motivos, distribuidos en 39 paneles correspondientes a 11 sitios, y sus cambios y/o continuidades a partir de la evaluación de cinco estratos de color. Los resultados muestran que las reglas vinculadas con las características visuales de las imágenes (forma y técnica), tienen mayor peso en la potencial codificación y decodificación de información visual, que las reglas vinculadas con el emplazamiento de las imágenes en los soportes y sus relaciones con otras imágenes.

From Basketmaker II to Pueblo II (200 BC–AD 1150), turkey husbandry flourished among Ancestral Pueblos inhabiting the northern and southern San Juan areas (300 BC–AD 1250) and the Rio Grande Valley (AD 1250– 1700) due to the ritual-symbolic importance of turkey feathers to rainmaking ideology. As primary caregivers, Ancestral Puebloan women's long-lasting social bond with domesticated turkeys was disrupted by Spanish maize and textile tribute (encomienda) systems and demands on Native labor (repartimiento) of the mid-1600s, a major factor contributing to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Despite the Spanish assault on their culture, Native people clandestinely practiced kachina religion by reusing turkey feather ceremonial objects, seeking refuge in ancestral mesa-top villages, and repurposing Spanish ecclesiastical materials as part of a pan-Pueblo resistance and revitalization movement. This study examines a previously overlooked form of Native resistance to Franciscan conversion efforts—“turkey girl” tales that appropriated and repurposed a Spanish religious folktale. Evidence suggests that these tales were authored by Pueblo Revolt–era war captains who attended Franciscan mission schools around the 1630s. To varying degrees, these “turkey girl” tales express nativist resistance to Franciscan conversion efforts, commitment to revitalization ideology, and pan-Pueblo ethnogenesis.

Archaic period hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created complex rock art murals containing elaborately painted anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures. These figures are frequently portrayed with dots or lines emanating out of or into their open mouths. In this article, we discuss patterns in shape, color, and arrangement of this pictographic element and propose that artists used this graphic device to denote speech, breath, and the soul. They communicated meaning through the image-making process, alternating brushstroke direction to indicate inhalation versus exhalation or using different paint application techniques to reflect measured versus forceful speech. The choices made by artists in the production of the imagery reflect their cosmology and the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted and interacted with the world. Bridging the iconographic data with ethnohistoric and ethnographic texts from Mesoamerica, we suggest that speech and breath expressed in the rock art of the Lower Pecos was tied to concepts of the soul, creation, and human origins.

Historic period Plains biographic art provides narratives of the deeds and actions of Indigenous peoples of the region. The Crow (Apsáalooke) are one such people with a rich record of biographic drawings in rock art and portable works. However, chronological and stylistic links between these two media have long been thought out of reach, even though such links are essential if the abundant Historic period rock art is to be fully incorporated into discussions of Apsáalooke history and their connection better ascertained to documented historical and ethnohistorical events and trends. Indeed, the lack of such a framework locks away a vast wealth of history in these hundreds of rock art pictures. In this article we present a statistical framework for comparing better-dated Crow portable artworks with their rock art equivalents. We are able to place rock art imagery from five sites into a relatively fine-grained chronological order, which permits a better understanding of changing patterns in Crow stylistic imagery. This permits a direct association with changing historical circumstances and facilitates a better understanding of the link between social history and the changing patterns seen in these artworks. Moreover, in one case, our analysis provides archaeological confirmation of Crow ethnohistory.

Even though Southeast Asia is one of the most densely populated regions of the world, its rock art is relatively unknown, and the rock art of Micronesia is even less so. As a starting point for comparing Philippine rock art within the region, a systematic quantitative literature review (SQLR) was conducted to assess the current body of accessible publications. The SQLR resulted in 126 viable references, and characteristics of those references were quantified and analyzed to ascertain the qualities of research published to date. The SQLR results show that scholarship in Southeast Asian rock art is increasing and that the research is dominated by Australia-affiliated scholars. It also quantitatively affirmed that the most noted color for rock art in the region is red and the most commonly identified motif is anthropomorphic. Many motifs found elsewhere in Southeast Asia are notably absent in the known corpus of Philippine rock art. Finally, we discuss SQLR methodology and propose integrating collaborative semantic web applications to increase efficiency and relevance.