Petroglyphs and puha: how multisensory experiences evidence landscape agency

ABSTRACT

Recent moves by many Great Basin and California scholars to connect the ethnographic record with archaeological evidence have fostered new understandings of the interconnected relationship between landscape, human behavior, and cosmology. Oral tradition and ethnographic commentary reinvigorate rock art research, once emblematic of interpretive impasses. Phenomena described as spirit voices connect multisensory religious experiences associated with such sites distributed throughout the region, and possibly result from rituals inherent in producing and interacting with painted and engraved images. The prolific ‘pecking’ production technique exemplifies actions which would result in both auditory experiences and durable visible traces. Recent fieldwork at a rock art site situated at the juncture of the Great Basin and Mojave Desert tested the propagation of sounds comparable to those generated with this technique. Preliminary results of ongoing analysis, reported here, demonstrate how low-cost equipment and zero-trace methods can be mobilized to generate useful and compelling data for addressing complex sensitive matters of non-western ontologies, all while remaining committed to the framework of the scientific method.

KEYWORDS:

• Archaeoacoustics
• neuropsychology
• religion
• rock art
• semiotics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the desert, and the canyon, for inspiration and invigoration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This project would not have been possible without financial support from the Fletcher Jones research grant, and from the UC Santa Cruz Archaeological Research Center (ARC).

Notes on contributors

Chester R. Liwosz

Chester R. Liwosz is a PhD candidate in archaeology, in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from which he also received his MA in anthropology. He earned a BA in anthropology from Kenyon College, having composed his honors thesis on Classic Period household archaeology undertaken in central Honduras. He now specializes in California and UtoAztecan archaeology, with research interests focused on rock art and religious practices.