Early Rock Art of the American West: The Geometric Enigma

by Ekkehart Malotki, Ellen Dissanayake

Overview

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

The earliest rock art - in the Americas as elsewhere - is geometric or abstract. Until Early Rock Art in the American West, however, no book-length study has been devoted to the deep antiquity and amazing range of geometrics and the fascinating questions that arise from their ubiquity and variety. Why did they precede representational marks? What is known about their origins and functions? Why and how did humans begin to make marks, and what does this practice tell us about the early human mind?

With some two hundred striking color images and discussions of chronology, dating, sites, and styles, this pioneering investigation of abstract geometrics on stone (as well as bone, ivory, and shell) explores its wide-ranging subject from the perspectives of ethology, evolutionary biology, cognitive archaeology, and the psychology of artmaking. The authors’ unique approach instills a greater respect for a largely unknown and underappreciated form of paleoart, suggesting that before humans became Homo symbolicus or even Homo religiosus, they were mark-makers - Homo aestheticus.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295743615
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	07/01/2018
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	812,716
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ekkehart Malotki is professor emeritus of languages at Northern Arizona University. He is the author of The Rock Art of Arizona: Art for Life’s Sake and Stone Chisel and Yucca Brush: Colorado Plateau Rock Art. Ellen Dissanayake is an independent scholar, author, and lecturer. She is the author of Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began; Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why; and What Is Art For?

What People are Saying About This

Christian Zuechner

"Malotki's fascinating photographs and Dissanayake's pathbreaking ideas make this book a must for all research on American rock art and the roots of human creativity."

Merlin Donald

"It is the hardest thing in the world to escape the grip of our own prejudices. Early Rock Art is important because it challenges our modern obsession with explicit symbols and stories and aims to free our theories of art from the iron grip of literate culture. I applaud the authors' efforts to dig deeper, to find the ancient roots of our aesthetic sensibilities."

James D. Keyser

"There is no previous book on this type of rock art—usually it is given only cursory treatment, largely because geometric imagery defies conventional approaches to interpretation. Malotki and Dissanayake address what we know and what we can know about early geometric rock art."

Tilman Lenssen-Erz

"A tribute to the artistic and intellectual achievements of Paleoamericans. Scholarly and innovative, sophisticated yet accessible, and with a wealth of breathtaking pictures."

Editorial Reviews

"In this fascinating volume, linguist Ekkehart Malotki and scholar Ellen Dissanayake parse images created up to 15,000 years ago by Palaeoamericans from Arizona to Idaho, speculating about their origins and functions. Alongside Malotki’s stunning photographs of some 200 examples, the authors recontextualize the relics as products of ritualistic activity (‘artification’) rather than symbolic artworks."

Nature

"Drawing on the insights of ethology, cognitive archaeology, evolutionary biology, and the psychology of art and art-making, the authors succeed in building a brilliant, substantive case for the antiquity of the early geometric enigmas that span the American West, and for the psychology behind their creation. . . . Essential. All readers."

Choice

"Here, finally, is a book that presents the remarkable first paleoart of North America comprehensively and in all its glory. Malotki’s marvelous ability to capture rock art photographically has been noted before as being without equal, and this book is no exception. . . . But what makes this volume so precious is the most propitious combination of Malotki’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Southwest’s rock art with Dissanayake’s sophisticated understanding of the nature of art-like production."

Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture - Robert Bednarik

In this fascinating volume, linguist Ekkehart Malotki and scholar Ellen Dissanayake parse images created up to 15,000 years ago by Palaeoamericans from Arizona to Idaho, speculating about their origins and functions. Alongside Malotki’s stunning photographs of some 200 examples, the authors recontextualize the relics as products of ritualistic activity (‘artification’) rather than symbolic artworks.

Nature Lib