Thunder and Herds by Lawrence L. Loendorf

There is no Rosetta Stone to help there are no direct means of translation.

This study of petroglyphs (images incised, pecked, and scratched into rock surfaces) and pictographs (images painted on rock surfaces) found on the Pajarito Plateau in New Mexico begins with a plea for caution regarding what can be learned in terms of what the graphic images mean. In searching for styles and meanings, it is easy for current archaeological strategies to guide scholarship into creating past worlds that are more compatible with present ideas than past realities. However, when images' semantic roles are not known and syntactic organization appears random, attempting a 'translation'may produce results more related to current archaeological thought than to the past views themselves. into words of a language and are arranged syntactically to convey meaning. Intangible worldviews are obtainable through graphic images, such as Egyptian or Mayan hieroglyphs, because they refer to sounds that combine. The archaeologist’s detective kit includes chemistry and physics, anthropology, geology, mythology, psychology, zoology, and art history.Īncestral Puebloan pictographs and petroglyphs may offer glimpses into aboriginal thought, into a collective mindset of a culture long gone, but archaeology only now has developed the means to understand what some of those ephemeral views might have been. The latter requires the researcher to traverse the humanities-science divide, calling on scientific techniques along with the knowledge of the lifeways and oral traditions of Indigenous people. The former requires patience, training, a discerning eye, and sometimes dumb luck. The twin joys of archaeology are discovery and the challenge of filling in missing pieces of history. From climate change to cultural migrations to landscape, Loendorf carefully reconstructs the contexts, cultural and physical, in which long-ago and not-so-long-ago American Indians created this complex array of images.

In this detailed exploration of the High Plains of Colorado and New Mexico, archaeologist Lawrence Loendorf proves as adept as Sherlock Holmes in bringing diverse and often surprising clues to bear on understanding the who, when, where, and why of ancient rock carvings and paintings. Archaeology is often described as detective work.

Thunder and Herds by Lawrence L. Loendorf