Indigenous Rock Art

In archaeology, rock art is human-made markings placed on natural surfaces, typically vertical stone surfaces. A high proportion of surviving historic and prehistoric rock art is found in caves or partly enclosed rock shelters; this type also may be called cave art or parietal art. A global phenomenon, rock art is found in many culturally diverse regions of the world. It has been produced in many contexts throughout human history. In terms of technique, the main groups are: petroglyphs, which are carved or scratched into the rock surface, cave paintings, and sculpted rock reliefs. Another technique creates geoglyphs that are formed on the ground. The oldest known rock art dates from the Upper Palaeolithic period, having been found in Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. Anthropologists studying these artworks believe that they likely had magico-religious significance.

The term rock art appears in the published literature as early as the 1940s. It has also been described as “rock carvings”, “rock drawings”, “rock engravings”, “rock inscriptions”, “rock paintings”, “rock pictures”, “rock records”, and “rock sculptures.

In most climates, only paintings in sheltered site, in particular caves, have survived for any length of time. Therefore, these are usually called “cave paintings”, although many do survive in “rock-shelters” or cliff-faces under an overhang. In prehistoric times these were often popular places for various human purposes, providing some shelter from the weather, as well as light. There may have been many more paintings in more exposed sites, that are now lost. Pictographs are paintings or drawings that have been placed onto the rock face. Such artworks have typically been made with mineral earths and other natural compounds found across much of the world. The predominantly used colours are red, black and white. Red paint is usually attained through the use of ground ochre, while black paint is typically composed of charcoal, or sometimes from minerals such as manganese. White paint is usually created from natural chalk, kaolinite clay or diatomaceous earth. Once the pigments had been obtained, they would be ground and mixed with a liquid, such as water, blood, urine, or egg yolk, and then applied to the stone as paint using a brush, fingers, or a stamp. Alternately, the pigment could have been applied on dry, such as with a stick of charcoal. In some societies, the paint itself has symbolic and religious meaning; for instance, among hunter-gatherer groups in California, paint was only allowed to be traded by the group shamans, while in other parts of North America, the word for “paint” was the same as the word for “supernatural spirit”.

Petroglyphs are engravings or carvings into rock which is left in situ. They can be created with a range of scratching, engraving or carving techniques, often with the use of a hard hammerstone, which is battered against the stone surface. In certain societies, the choice of hammerstone itself has religious significance. In other instances, the rock art is pecked out through indirect percussion, as a second rock is used like a chisel between the hammerstone and the panel. A third, rarer form of engraving rock art was through incision, or scratching, into the surface of the stone with a lithic flake or metal blade. The motifs produced using this technique are fine-lined and often difficult to see.

The Americas

Petroglyphs of the Cosos
China Lake Naval Weapons Center

The Cosos lie within the confines of China Lake Naval Weapons Center (NWC), the U.S. Navy’s largest research and development facility. It encompasses about 1,200 square miles of dry lake beds, desert mountains and volcanic lava flows in southeastern California.

Native American rock painting close to Douglas, Wyoming, USA. One possible interpretation of this painting is: On the left side a group of United States Army soldiers with different insignia and on the right side Native Americans are shown.

Puebloan Pictography

The oldest reliably dated rock art in the Americas is known as the “Horny Little Man.” It is petroglyph depicting a stick figure with an oversized phallus and carved in Lapa do Santo, a cave in central-eastern Brazil.^[40] The most important site is Serra da Capivara National Park at Piauí state. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with the largest collection in the American continent and one of the most studied.

A site including eight miles of paintings or pictographs that is under study in Colombia, South America at Serranía de la Lindosa was revealed in November 2020.^[41] Their age is suggested as being 12,500 years old (c. 10,480 B.C.) by the anthropologists working on the site because of extinct fauna depicted.

Colorado Rock Art Association

Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands) (Argentina) – a series of caves exhibiting hundreds of outlines of human hands, hunting scenes, and animals painted 13,000 to 9,000 years ago.^[23]
Bird stones (5,000 to 2,500 years old) are portable bird-shaped stone sculptures created by generations of North American sculptors.
Toquepala Caves (Peru) – “Abrigo del Diablo” and the other caves contain at least 50 noted pieces. The artists used paint made from hematite, and painted in seven colors with red being dominant.

Rock paintings or pictographs are located in many areas across Canada. There are over 400 sites attributed to the Ojibway from northern Saskatchewan to the Ottawa River.

Pomier Caves, Dominican Republic
Naj Tunich, Guatemala
Rock Paintings of Sierra de San Francisco, Baja California, Mexico
Sierra de Guadalupe cave paintings, Baja California, Mexico
Pictograph Cave Complex, Billings, Montana, United States
Cañon Pintado, Colorado, United States
Chaco Culture National Historical Park, New Mexico, United States
Chumash rock art, California, United States
Coso Rock Art District, California, United States
Nine Mile Canyon, Utah, United States
Quail rock art panel, Utah, United States
Painted Rocks, Arizona, United States
Petroglyph National Monument, New Mexico, United States
Serra da Capivara National Park, Piauí, Brazil
Vale do Catimbau National Park, Pernambuco, Brazil.
Localidad Rupestre de Chamangá, Uruguay
Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada
Cueva de las Manos, Santa Cruz Province, Argentina
Huerfano Butte, Arizona, United States
Petroglyphs Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada
Serranía La Lindosa, Guaviare Department, Colombia

Western Asia

Rock Art in the Ha’il Region in Saudi Arabia
Iranian rock art sites are mostly found in the Zagros Mountain range. But there are many other sites in Central Iran, Sistan and Baluchistan, and Azarbaijan. Most of these rock arts date back to the late prehistory and historic period. Among which the well-known sites of Houmian at Kuhdasht, Khomein, and Teimareh in Central Iran are outstanding.
Large carvings of camels that were discovered in 2018 in Saudi Arabia are estimated to be 7,000 to 8,000 years old. This Neolithic dating would make the carvings significantly older than Stonehenge (5,000 years old) and the Egyptian pyramids at Giza (4,500 years old).

Australia

Indigenous Australian art § Rock art

Australian Indigenous art represents the oldest unbroken tradition of art in the world. There are more than 100,000 recorded rock art sites in Australia.

The oldest firmly dated rock-art painting in Australia is a charcoal drawing on a rock fragment found during the excavation of the Nawarla Gabarnmang rock shelter in south western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Dated at 28,000 years, it is one of the oldest known pieces of rock art on Earth with a confirmed date. Nawarla Gabarnmang is consideredto have one of the most extensive collections of rock art in the world and predates both Lascaux and Chauvet cave art – the earliest known art in Europe – by at least 10,000 years.

Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory has a large collection of ochre paintings. Ochre is a not an organic material, so carbon dating of these pictures is impossible. Sometimes the approximate date, or at least an epoch, can be guessed from the content.

**The Sydney region has important rock engravings.**

Mount Grenfell Historic Site near Cobar, western New South Wales has important ancient rock-drawings.
The Murujuga (Burrup Peninsula) area of Western Australia near Karratha is estimatedto be home to between 500,000 and 1 million individual engravings.

Kimberley region of Western Australia. Amateur archaeologist Grahame Walsh, who researched Gwion Gwion rock paintings in the region from 1977 until his death in 2007, produced a photographic database of 1.5 million Gwion Gwion rock paintings. Many of the Gwion rock paintings maintain vivid colours because they have been colonised by bacteria and fungi, such as the black fungus, *Chaetothyriales*. The pigments originally applied may have initiated an ongoing, symbiotic relationship between black fungi and red bacteria.

The Grampians-Gariwerd region is Victoria is one of the richest Aboriginal rock art sites in south-eastern Australia. Some of the more well-known and easily accessible sites are the Ngamadjidj Shelter (Cave of Ghosts), Gulgurn Manja (Flat Rock), Billimina (Glenisla Shelter) and Manja (Cave of Hands); one of the most significant sites in south-eastern Australia is Bunjil’s Shelter, near Stawell, which is the only known rock art depiction of Bunjil, the creator-being in Aboriginal Australian mythology.

The Maliwawa Figures in Arnhem Land, a series of 571 paintings and a drawing, created between 6,000 and 9,400 years ago, show a style nor recognised by researchers in the field before new research was done in 2016–2018 and published in September 2020 by Paul Taçon and his team.
The Turramurra site in western Queensland is opening in 2020. Cliffs on the property, for some time known as Grace Vale Station, are covered with ancient rock art, including paintings and etchings of megafauna, emu symbols and the traditional songline of the Seven Sisters. Planning for an educational centre created from local rock is under way.

List of Stone Age art

The oldest undisputed figurative art appears with the Aurignacian, about 40,000 years ago, which is associated with the earliest presence of Cro-Magnon artists in Europe. Figurines with date estimates of 40,000 years are the so-called Lion-man and Venus of Hohle Fels, both found in the Southern Germany caves of the Swabian Jura.

Alaska

Wrangell Petroglyphs

Kodiak Petroglyphs

Petersburg

Eastern US

Alabama

Arkansas

Connecticut

Georgia

Illinois

Maine

Massachusetts

Michigan

Missouri

Washington State Park

North Carolina

North Dakota

Ohio

South Carolina

South Dakota

Tennessee

Vermont

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Roche-A-Cri State Park

Northern California

Lava Beds National Monument

Indian Grinding Rocks State Park

Ring Mountain

Canada

British Columbia

Stein Valley

Nanaimo

Sproat Lake

Gabriola Island

Ontario

Petroglyphs Provincial Park

St. Victor’s

Great Lakes and Boundary Waters

Bon Echo

Lake Superior Provincial Park

Boundary Waters and Quetico

Alberta

Saskatchewan

Hawaii

Kauai

Oahu

Big Island

Lanai

Maui

Idaho

Treaty Rock

Owhyee

Hells Canyon w/ Buffalo Eddy

Celebration Park

Salmon River

Malad Gorge

Kansas

Minnesota

Pipestone National Monument

Jeffers Petroglyphs

Montana

Nebraska

Oklahoma

Oregon

Summer Lake

Dalles

Hells Canyon

Joseph Creek Wilderness

Washington

Cape Alava

Gingko Petrified Forest

Horsethief Lake State Park

Lake Lenore Caves

Hells Canyon

Wyoming

Legend Rock

Dinwoody

Medicine Lodge

Tensleep

Petroglyphs of the Cosos
China Lake Naval Weapons Center