Description
With an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 sites spread during its canyons, mountains and deserts, the Grand Canyon state of Arizona constitutes one of the crucial premier rock art theaters on the planet. Consisting primarily of engraved images (petroglyphs) on sandstone and basalt, but also offering paintings (pictographs) under overhangs, and ground figures (geoglyphs) on the desert pavements, Arizona’s rock art really commands awe and respect. This book, in a comprehensive survey, presents the full gamut of the state’s impressive open-air art from its earliest beginnings until more recent manifestations in the historic era. Though The Rock Art of Arizona contains more than 380 color photographs, over 130 drawings, and a large number of charts and maps, it goes beyond the usual bounds of a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book. Along with describing the more than a few Archaic and post Archaic rock art styles and traditions in the state’s fifteen counties, writer Ekkehart Malotki specializes in providing insights into what may have compelled Arizona’s ancestral artists to produce the imagery and what functions it may have had in their daily lives. At the same time, he acknowledges the severe limitations of scientifically dating the paleoart, the subjective biases involved in stylistic classification, and the ultimate mystery of its meaning. Within the confines of this explanatory framework, drawing primarily on novel ideas derived from the field of evolutionary psychology and the concept of human universals, he argues that rock art, in a broadly defined context of art and ritual, had a good option adaptive value in the human struggle for survival and thus can really be perceived as art for life’s sake.