Perspectives on Differences in Rock Art - Jan Magne Gjerde
Location is (Almost) Everything: Rock Art Differences across the Sacred Landscape of the Klamath Basin (Oregon/California, USA)
Perspectives on Differences in Rock Art - Jan Magne Gjerde
Robert J. David [+]
University of California, Berkeley
Robert J. David is an independent archaeological contractor and Research Affiliate of the Archaeological Research Facility at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his PhD in Anthropology. His research interests include North American rock art, and he has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals on the rock art of the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon. He is a member of the Klamath Tribes and currently lives in Chiloquin, Oregon where he continues his research.
Margaret W. Conkey [+]
University of California, Berkeley
Margaret W. Conkey is the Class of 1960 Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has focused on interpretation in rock art and visual culture, especially of the Upper Paleolithic of Europe; on the study of gender and the feminist practice of archaeology; on landscape archaeologies, and on issues of mobility, “home”, and the social practice of hunter-gatherers of late Upper Paleolithic southwest Europe. She is currently a Co-director of excavations at the Magdalenian period open air site of Peyre Blanque in the Ariège of France.
Description
We address ‘differences’ in rock art production at the Klamath Basin in Oregon/California, USA. Rock art designs are not distributed uniformly across the landscape, even at the level of a given motif. Taking one widespread motif – the nucleated concentric circle – as a key symbol, we show how it varies across settlement sites, special-use areas and frequently-used areas, and how its symbolic significance differs according to the context in which it appears. This landscape context model suggests that within-group variation is better understood in terms of what Richard Wilk has called ‘common difference’, rather than ‘stylistic differences’.