SEMINAR: Archaeological Seminar Series Semester 1, 2011

The recent confirmation of the first authentic mammoth depictions in the rock art of North America not only unequivocally testifies to the coexistence of humans and Ice Age megafauna on the Colorado Plateau, but also may alter our views on what kind of artistic toolkit Palaeoamericans entering the New World brought with them. In the Western United States, all earliest palaeoart, including rock art, attributable to the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition is lumped together here as Western Archaic Tradition (WAT). Consisting of abstract-geometric designs, both painted and engraved, it is consistent with the universally observable pattern that noniconic imagery distinguishes all earliest marking traditions. While in the American West a "representational revolution" with an emphasis on lifeforms such as humans and animals is generally not found until Middle Holocene times, the first occurrences of figurative elements in WAT imagery display a seemingly restricted vocabulary of animal and bird tracks as well as human hand- and footprints. Examples of similar "proto-iconic precursors" in Australia and South America seem to indicate that this evolutionary path to full iconicity is also evident in other parts of the world.