Petroglyphs and puha: how multisensory experiences evidence landscape agency

Abstract

ABSTRACTRecent moves by many Great Basin and California scholars to connect the ethnographic record with archaeological evidence have fostered new understandings of the interconnected relationship between landscape, human behavior, and cosmology. Oral tradition and ethnographic commentary reinvigorate rock art research, once emblematic of interpretive impasses. Phenomena described as spirit voices connect multisensory religious experiences associated with such sites distributed throughout the region, and possibly result from rituals inherent in producing and interacting with painted and engraved images. The prolific ‘pecking’ production technique exemplifies actions which would result in both auditory experiences and durable visible traces. Recent fieldwork at a rock art site situated at the juncture of the Great Basin and Mojave Desert tested the propagation of sounds comparable to those generated with this technique. Preliminary results of ongoing analysis, reported here, demonstrate how low-cost equipment and zero-trace methods can be mobilized to generate useful and compelling data for addressing complex sensitive matters of non-western ontologies, all while remaining committed to the framework of the scientific method.