Includes information on protected rock art sites in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. Gives information on these special rock art areas: Albuquerque and Santa Fe Area; Arches National Park; Bandelier National Monument Area; Canyon de Chelly National Monument; Canyonlands National Park--Maze Area; Canyonlands National Park--Needles Area; Capitol Reef National Park;Central Utah Area; Chaco Canyon Area; Desolation-Gray Canyon of the Green River; Grand Canyon National Park; Grand Gulch Primitive Area;Hovenweep National Monument; Indian Creek Canyon; Moab Area; Petrified Forest National Park; San Juan River Gorge; Three Rivers Area; Uintah Basin Area; West-Central Colorado Area; Zuñi-Cibola Area; miscellaneous areas; and Anasazi celestial rock art.

Paul G. Bahn provides a richly illustrated overview of prehistoric rock art and cave art from around the world.

High above the noise and traffic of metropolitan Phoenix, Native American rock art offers mute testimony that another civilization once thrived in the Arizona desert. In the city's South Mountains, prehispanic peoples pecked thousands of images into the mountains' boulders and outcroppings—images that today's hikers can encounter with every bend in the trail. Todd Bostwick, an archaeologist who has studied the Hohokam for more than twenty years, and Peter Krocek, a professional photographer with a passion for archaeology, have combed the South Mountains to locate nearly all of the ancient petroglyphs found in the canyons and ridges. Their years of learning the landscape and investigating the ancient designs have resulted in a book that explores this wealth of prehistoric rock art within its natural and cultural contexts, revealing what these carvings might mean, how they got there, and when they were made. Landscape of the Spirits is the first book to cover these ancient images and is one of the most comprehensive treatments of a rock art location ever published. It conveys the range of different rock art elements and compositions found in the South Mountains—animals, humans, and geometric shapes, as well as celestial and calendrical markings at key sites—through accurate descriptions, drawings, and photographs. Interpretations of the petroglyphs are based on Native American ethnographic accounts and consider the most recent theories concerning shamanism and archaeoastronomy. Written in a simple and accessible style, Landscape of the Spirits is an indispensable volume for anyone exploring the South Mountains, and for rock art enthusiasts everywhere who wish to broaden their understanding of the prehistoric world. It is both an authoritative overview of these ancient wonders and an unprecedented benchmark in southwestern rock art research at a single geographic location.

Did your child enjoy the school discussions on prehistoric art? Then feed that excitement even more by supplementing with this book of social studies. Through the lessons discussed in these pages, your child will learn to examine and describe the key characteristics of prehistoric cave art. Get a copy for your child today.

Prehistoric rock art is the markings - paintings, engravings, or pecked images - left on rocks or cave walls by ancient peoples. In this book, Paul G. Bahn provides a richly illustrated overview of prehistoric rock art and cave art from around the world. Summarizing the recent advances in our understanding of this extraordinary visual record, he discusses new discoveries, new approaches to recording and interpretation, and current problems in conservation. Bahn focuses in particular on current issues in the interpretation of rock art, notably the "shamanic" interpretation that has been influential in recent years and that he refutes. This book is based on the Rhind Lectures that the author delivered for the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 2006.

Prehistoric Rock Paintings Of Bhimbetka By Dr. Yashodhar Mathpal Is The First Exhaustive Study Of A Single Rock Art Site In India. It Covers The Entire Art Activity In The Form Of Paintings Found In 133 Caves At Bhimbetka, Central India, The Largest Concentration Of Rock Paintings In The Country. For The First Time Copies Of Prehistoric Cave Paintings Have Been Made On The Spot, In Original Colour, To Scale And With Original Background. All The Superimpositions Of Figures Have Been Copied. For The First Time Indian Rock Paintings Are Dated 10,000 Years Back On The Firm Ground Of The Archaeological Findings From The Excavations Of Painted Caves. For The First Time Indian Rock Paintings Have Been Studied In Their Historical Perspective. For Example, The First Discovery Of Rock Paintings Was Made In India 12 Years Before Their Discovery Of Altamira In Spain. India Is Also The First Country To Recognize The Antiquity Of Rock Paintings. For The First Time Too The Maximum Literary, Ethnologic And Archaeological Evidences Have Been Researched For Evidence Of Drawing Material, Motivation And The Antiquity Of Rock Paintings. In His Foreword To This Monumental Work Professor H.D. Sankalia Says: This Work Is Unique Because For The First Time Prehistoric Indian Paintings Are Evaluated By A Scholar Who Is Artist By Nature And Training And A Trained Prehistorian, And Thus Eminently Qualified To Write On The Subject.

This study analyses almost 300 known prehistoric rock art sites dating from c.2500 BC set within their environmental context. Susan Searight discusses the themes and motifs represented, comprising anthropomorphs, human hands and feet, weapons, agricultural tools, chariots and geometric forms, and their distribution.

Along the Atlantic seaboard, from Scotland to Spain, are numerous rock carvings made four to five thousand years ago, whose interpretation poses a major challenge to the archaeologist. In the first full-length treatment of the subject, based largely on new fieldwork, Richard Bradley argues that these carvings should be interpreted as a series of symbolic messages that are shared between monuments, artefacts and natural places in the landscape. He discusses the cultural setting of the rock carvings and the ways in which they can be interpreted in relation to ancient land use, the creation of ritual monuments and the burial of the dead. Integrating this fascinating yet little-known material into the mainstream of prehistoric studies, Richard Bradley demonstrates that these carvings played a fundamental role in the organization of the prehistoric landscape.

Drawing on the most up-to-the-minute research on prehistoric art, an anthropologist presents a global survey, starting with the first explosion of imagery that occurred approximately 40,000 years ago but also including the creations of essentially "prehistoric" peoples living as recently as the early 20th century. 226 illustrations.

Pecos River style pictographs are one of the most complex forms of rock art worldwide. The dramatic prehistoric pictographs on the limestone overhangs of the lower Pecos and Devils Rivers in West Texas have been the subject of preservation and study since the 1930s, and dedicated research continues to this day. The medium is large-scale, polychrome pictographs in open rock shelter settings, emphasizing the animistic/shamanistic religion practiced by the local aboriginal peoples. Creating large-scale rock murals required intelligence, skill, and knowledge. These enigmatic images, some dating to 4,500 years ago and possibly earlier, depict strange, vaguely human and animal shapes and various geometric forms. While full understanding of the meaning of these images is abstruse, archaeologists and other scholars have identified what they believe to be patterns and religious themes, mixed with what could be figures and objects from everyday life in the local hunter-gatherer culture as it existed in the region centuries before the arrival of colonizing Europeans. Although interpretation of these pictographs remains controversial, in Pecos River Style Rock Art: A Prehistoric Iconography, James Burr Harrison Macrae contributes to the beginnings of a syntactic “grammar” for these images that can be applied in diverse contexts without direct reference to any particular interpretation. “The strength of structural-iconographic analysis,” Macrae writes, “is that it relies on repetitive patterns rather than idiosyncratic information, such as trying to make broad inferences from one or only a few sites.” Pecos River Style Rock Art offers the framework of an empirical methodology for understanding these ancient artworks.