In this issue’s opening paper, Thomas N. Huffman and Frank Lee Earley present a fascinating study of rock art in the lower Apishapa canyon in southeast Colorado, finding that it has more in common with Great Basin Culture than Great Plains influences. Their clear and ethnologically-based investigation shows the abstract rock art in the canyon to relate to “concepts of dynamic power, soul travel, and sacred pilgrimages”. They assert that the shamanistic concept held by Great Basin peoples of this dynamic, invisible supernatural power, puha, is particularly important in understanding the rock art. The occurrence of the rock art in lower Apishapa Canyon shows it to be one of the places where puha was believed to concentrate.
In the following paper, William F. Romain provides a rare study of the archaeoastronomy and Feng-Shui of the fabled Xanadu, Kublai Khan’s Imperial Mongolian Capital. He shows how the ancient city was “enmeshed with cosmic agents and forces through astronomy, geometry, mensuration, and ritual. Xanadu was the result of a deliberate entanglement with the visible and invisible; with the real and the imagined”. This is in keeping with what we know from ethnography, that Chinese cities were laid out in accordance with cosmological concepts which included Feng-Shui, a system that incorporated ideas involving the belief in an all-pervading invisible life force, Qi (Ch’i), a not altogether dissimilar idea to that of puha, held over half the ancient world away.
And we come directly back to puha in Chester R. Liwosz’s paper, “Petroglyphs and Puha: How Multisensory Experiences Evidence Landscape Agency”. The focus of his study is rock art in a canyon situated at a convergence area of the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert in eastern California. Liwosz points out, like Huffman and Earley, how “oral tradition and ethnographic commentary reinvigorate rock art research”, and he draws on that background knowledge in his intensive physical exploration of the canyon. Puha, he explains, was an invisible force that, somewhat like electricity, could have dangerous aspects as well as beneficial ones, and was unevenly distributed through the landscape, becoming more concentrated in some places that were more difficult of access and potentially more dangerous in nature. He refers to the canyon he studies, for instance, as having its own agency – for a range of reasons explained in the paper – and this agency “and thus puha” of the canyon would have been evidenced not only in the rock art imagery but also in curious echoes, distorted tones, and resonant harmonics. “Each of these, from an observer’s perspective,” he notes, “could be conceptualized as the canyon speaking or singing back.”
These three exceptional papers are followed by a Correspondence section that involves a dispute about an image carved in the Neolithic Le Déhus monument in Guernsey (see also the September 2016 issue of T&M, pp.245-265), and complaints about the alleged archaeological treatment of some sites in the Netherlands. Finally, we have our book reviews section, this time involving extensive reviews of books variously entitled: Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church; Ritual Landscapes and Borders within Rock Art Research: Papers in Honour of Professor Kalle Sognnes, and Set in Stone? War Memorialisation as a Long-Term and Continuing Process in the UK, France and the USA. Reviewers are Ronald Hutton, Laura Slack, and Bob Trubshaw.