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Amerindian Perspectivism - Ep 118
569 Plays10 months ago
Alan and Chris have a conversation about how past Native American cultures interpreted and interacted with their environment, and how that should impact the modern interpretation of rock art archaeological sites today.
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/118
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- Dr. Alan Garfinkel [email protected] Dr. Alan Garfinkel’s Website Support Dr. Garfinkel on Patreon
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Transcript
Introduction to California Rock Art Foundation
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage, and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:21
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja, California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites.
00:00:42
Speaker
So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org. Also, I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting, helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts, and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation, and of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening to the Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
00:01:33
Speaker
Hey gang, it's Dr. Alan Gold for Episode 118 on your Rock Art Podcast.
Exploring American Indian Perspectivism
00:01:39
Speaker
We're going to have Chris and I bantering back and forth about American Indian perspectivism. This is where we talk about the theology, the perspective, and the cosmology of Native people.
00:01:56
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. This is Chris Webster, usually the producer of the show. And well, at least the guy who sits in the background just listens and is entertained.
00:02:05
Speaker
today, as you've heard in the past, anytime I come on, that means it's going to be Alan and I. And Alan is going to be telling us about something he's researched, studied, written, is interested in, something along those lines. And today we're going to talk about Amerindian perspectivism, right? And we've talked about this actually, this perspectivism concept in a few episodes with Johnny Valdez that we just had not too long ago. We can check those out and we'll probably link to those in the show notes. And then also,
00:02:34
Speaker
If you just search perspectivism on the APN website, you can see some other podcasts related to that topic. And if you want to follow along, Alan's got actually a PowerPoint, but I'm going to put it in as a PDF in the show notes and you can check that out, download it, and kind of follow along as we go. We're not really going to call out slide transitions or anything, but it'll be a nice little reference to have while we're listening to the show. So
00:02:57
Speaker
Allen, why don't we start by just defining for the audience who may not be aware of this relatively academic term, perspectivism. What do we mean by that? What I'm trying to talk about is that the Western industrial perspective, they call it Cartesian logic,
00:03:16
Speaker
is rather linear.
Western Logic vs. Indigenous Perspectives
00:03:17
Speaker
It's based on science. It's based on certain principles that we espouse. We believe that there is a reality to life and that science can in fact test this reality and examine it and we can come up with different theories and different facts about the nature of the universe, the nature of our life,
00:03:39
Speaker
and that is the way things are and we like them that way and they seem to be logical and dependable and able to be tested and proved. But that is a very different way of thinking completely than most Indigenous Native societies throughout the globe.
00:04:00
Speaker
And you probably have had some familiarity with this, haven't you, Chris? Yeah. Well, I mean, I've interviewed a bunch of people and talked about different societies past and present around the earth. And everybody really does see things differently. In fact, I got to bring this up because we just interviewed Susan Milbreath and Elizabeth Bakadano. And they are co-editors of a volume
00:04:25
Speaker
on, we basically just interviewed them about a new edited volume that they've got out. And Elizabeth did an entire chapter on frogs and toads because it's about beasts and birds and things like that and how they're represented, I know, in Mesoamerican culture. And it just
00:04:42
Speaker
Some of the things that just floor me, we think we understand some things about rocker, but there's so much we don't. Because for example, there's a symbol, when you have a frog effigy or carving or something like that down in some areas of Mesoamerica, she was working in Central America area, not the Maya, but south of there.
00:05:00
Speaker
And these frogs have like a water symbol on their stomachs. And for a long time, people didn't really know what that meant. They thought it meant it just like, okay, frogs are in the water. Great. That's what that means. But on further studies, she really got into the biology of frogs and certain frogs in that area absorb water
00:05:17
Speaker
through their stomachs, through just permeable stomachs. They don't really drink it. They just absorb it. Aztecs and the people down in the area, they knew that. They knew that the biology of these frogs, they didn't call it biology, of course, but they watched them enough to know that, hey, this is going on here. And then they would use that water symbol on other things that would represent sort of the absorption of water, if you want to say it like that. And I just, it's fascinating to me how much
00:05:45
Speaker
the perspective, as we're talking about, of native peoples was just influenced by their surroundings and how much it's not these days, you know, with us. I mean, it is to some people, but we're influenced by other things, but they were influenced greatly by their surroundings. Yeah. So to start off, to kick it off, what makes, I guess, this Amerindian perspective or even global indigenous perspective different?
Nature and Indigenous Worldviews
00:06:12
Speaker
is there's this intimate and direct connection between these people and their environment. People and their environment. What I mean by that is the land, the animals, the plants, the cosmos, the natural world and the celestial universe is integrated and unified and connected to the way in which they process and deal with life on a daily basis.
00:06:39
Speaker
which is very, very different from the way in which our culture today is because we're so divorced from that. We're so segmented and partitioned and insulated. Don't you agree?
00:06:56
Speaker
I do. Yeah, I very much agree. So, I think for someone just a standard run-of-the-mill academician or anyone else trying to understand or appreciate or develop some, you know, if understanding of what native people are trying to communicate, it's rather difficult to appreciate or understand that I would say coming from our particular
00:07:24
Speaker
perspective. Since contemporary industrial people are literate, they are looking for words. They're divorced from contact with this environment. We get our food from the market. We buy our meat at the butcher. We get our water from the faucet. We tell time by a clock and a calendar. That is so, so different.
00:07:47
Speaker
than anything even close to the way in which native people process the world. Our homes and offices are insulated, heating and air conditioning. We look at the heavens. We often cannot see the star-filled sky due to light pollution and other considerations. We even really recognize the pattern movements of the stars, the moon and the sun. And when I talk to people about that, I talk about a winter solstice or summer solstice, and they go, well, what is that?
00:08:16
Speaker
Right? This is all part and parcel of we're just scratching the surface. Often, native people are connected, tethered to the landscape.
00:08:33
Speaker
They know every nook and cranny, every hill, every drainage, every spring, every river, every rock is part and parcel of their knowledge. And we're a mobile people and we're not connected to the local geography. We move about the planet and we don't have a hankering or a association with a particular geographical point on the landscape. That is very, very different.
00:09:03
Speaker
And I think the interesting thing about that is, though, you're right. Native peoples in general were just intimately aware of their immediate surroundings and probably the region within reason, within walking distance, of course, and everything around there.
00:09:19
Speaker
And while we don't have that intimate knowledge of our surroundings, we have an incredible knowledge of the rest of the world that native people just simply didn't have. We know about other cultures and other countries, and it could probably point them out on a map. And it is a different perspective. I wouldn't say it's a worse one, but it's a different perspective. We're aware of our place in the universe physically, not just metaphorically and spiritually.
00:09:42
Speaker
If you have Amerindian perspectivism, we've got trans-cultural perspectivism. That's the terminology. We're getting into a global environment and interconnecting with the world on a digital platform. But if we take a step back, these Native Americans, these indigenous religions and religious ideas sometimes are looked upon as primitive, simplistic, silly, naive, etc., etc.
Indigenous Spirituality and Major Religions
00:10:12
Speaker
But remember that even our so-called major world religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, often incorporate the exact same spiritual ideas and religious metaphors, having their origins or analogues in ancient indigenous religions.
00:10:32
Speaker
the centrality of sacrifice, the propitiation to the divine, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, a covenant, a formalized relationship, an agreement, or a contract with a creator, prayer, intercession, metaphors of light and darkness, priests and ritual specialists, ceremonials, first fruit rites, think about confirmation, baptism, bar and bat mitzvah, quinceañera, marriage, funerals, et cetera. So we're not that far afield
00:11:03
Speaker
from these very different platforms if we try to capture or appreciate the parallels. How's that? Yeah, that's true. The concepts of ritual, sacrifice, singing, dancing, oral tradition, covenants of light and darkness, flesh and blood, ritual priests, intermediaries, these ritual costumes, these ceremonial instruments,
00:11:26
Speaker
You know, even this thing about caves as portals and to the supernatural and entrances to the ethereal realm, they're not so different from some of the things we've talked about in various religions. Yeah, they're not. Especially with Catholicism. I don't know why, but Catholicism seems to have anchored on to
00:11:46
Speaker
some of these principles in a way that some of the other religions have not. But I'm sure that if you look at Buddhism and others, they have a similar kind of a connection. When you're talking about these cultures, and we're talking about pre-agriculturalists, which of course is most of the period of time when we're dealing with archaeology,
00:12:08
Speaker
Subsistence, you know, making a life way, finding proper food was a direct result of the energies of women and men on their households. They only eat what they were able to harvest or kill. And if there was a drought or a bad season or fire or a
00:12:22
Speaker
or some sort of key economic plant, such as pinon or acorns or some other staple crop, and it failed. They were facing death and starvation. Large game animals, of course, could be hunted. You're talking about bighorn sheep, antelope, elk, deer, moose, et cetera. But they're not so easy to acquire. Not with the kind of technology that was characteristic
00:12:48
Speaker
of most of our prehistory. Would you agree? Yeah, I think so. And I think with that, let's go ahead and take a break and come back on the other side and continue discussing this topic back in a minute. Welcome back to The Rock, our podcast episode 118. Alan, continue on. We ended the last segment there and we were just in mid thought. So let's keep this going. We're talking about large game animals. You know, you want
00:13:15
Speaker
decent meat packages if you're going to risk your life and do this kind of work and try to harvest the game and slay these large animals. It's still rather difficult. I talk to people who work with the assistants to these game drives or these games where they try to get a bighorn sheep. They're using high-tech technology
00:13:39
Speaker
And it doesn't always work. They can't always get one, even though they're around and they know they're there. You gotta find them, right? And then they gotta make sure that they don't see them because if they see them, they're gone, right? And then they've gotta be able to get close enough to get a shot off and then they've gotta be able to kill them. It's not so simple. It's really difficult.
00:14:02
Speaker
So it takes skill, patience, thoughtful strategy. They had to know about the wind patterns. They had to know about the way in which the animals move. They had to find the animals to begin with. They're not so easily found. And I contributed to a book that just came out about the masters of animals and the spiritual gamekeepers. And this was a concept all throughout the world, through the globe, that there are these supernatural
00:14:29
Speaker
animal human figures that were deities, super mundane beings that interceded for the people and helped them to hunt the game and kill them. And only if they practice the proper ceremonies, propitiation, and also did the proper rituals in association before and after, would they be first of all be allowed to hunt the animals and kill them.
00:15:00
Speaker
And if they did not do that, even if they hunted and killed the animals, they're not going to get no mo because the spiritual game keeper, the animal mistress or animal master, is going to be pissed off with them and is going to pull the plug on this cycle.
00:15:16
Speaker
that they are responsible for. And the cycle has to do with when the animal passes away, they have a postmortem ceremony and they showcase the bones. Sometimes the bones have to be placed in a certain way or cached in a certain way. And then, you know, a special, they have to eat the animal and share the meat in a certain way. Otherwise, they're plumb out of luck.
00:15:42
Speaker
The animals themselves were viewed as part and parcel beings at the same level, at the same physiological interpersonal level as humankind. So what I'm saying by that is that animals were viewed as other than human persons.
00:16:07
Speaker
I know that sounds crazy, but that's what it was. They were beings that when animals were people, they continued to be animals now, but we lost our animal nature, but the animals kept it.
00:16:23
Speaker
And so, what this is seen as is when you hear about these tribes, these people, they say, well, we are the, you know, Bitcoin sheep eaters, or we're the, you know, we're from the elk people. These individual groups believed that they were descended from a
00:16:42
Speaker
animal human, big corn sheep, or an animal human bear, or an animal human elk, and they trace their descent directly from that being as a bit of totemism, as a bit of animism, shamanism is incorporated with all that. But it is part and parcel of who they are, their identity, their signature, their character is emblazoned upon the land
00:17:11
Speaker
as part and parcel of that animal being, and that animal becomes a significant signature of the group.
00:17:21
Speaker
So for one, it might be a bighorn. For one, it might be a bear, or it might be a snake, or it might be an antelope. And this happens all over the world that these particular animals become an index or a semiotic being, just a package of metaphors relating to who these people are, who they are prone to be. And they know them in terms of their habits and their habitats.
00:17:51
Speaker
They know the intimate elements of how they do things so that they can connect with them, kill them and eat them, but also because they have an intimate kinship with that animal. I wonder if you can track, because I was just thinking about
00:18:12
Speaker
Certain animals obviously are migratory and definitely Native American groups would follow migratory animals for sustenance and things like that. But then also, as things changed and maybe tribes got bigger and turned into larger entities and moving was hard, then they would become more sedentary in certain places. And then maybe deal with migratory animals as they came through.
00:18:39
Speaker
but started hitting more non-migratory game, smaller game that didn't migrate and mammals I'm talking about, not just birds, but those sorts of things. And I'm wondering if the kinship fell with animals can be traced through that sort of tend towards sedentary behavior. You know what I mean? As the animals change in the symbolism, the rock art and how they thought about the world, how that was parallel with
00:19:06
Speaker
their settlement patterns? Well, they morph. They change. So, there's an evolution of changes in the symbolism and the ideology. There's a change in the meaning and metaphor. But the symbols can be deconstructed, and you can see the sort of evolution of how people's beliefs
00:19:26
Speaker
are altered by the changes in their demography, in their subsistence basis, in the way in which they're conducting their activities, in the complexity of their civilization. You can think about it in the sense of thinking about the great high cultures of Mexico who still practiced a livelihood or a religious metaphor relating to snakes.
00:19:53
Speaker
And that became the significant element to who they were and what they were. It was snakes in the sun. It was all about those particular elements that became the hallmarks, the pinnacle of their signatures.
00:20:10
Speaker
again and again. Now those go way back, and so there's a continuous thread that you can deconstruct and see all the way back to when there were hunter-gatherers and see that same element.
Rock Art as Portals and Axis Mundi
00:20:23
Speaker
It didn't have exactly the same meaning, but yet they were still depicting and using those particular creatures as a means of communicating who they were.
00:20:38
Speaker
The other thing that I haven't mentioned that's rather important here is that if you're dealing with rock art, since we're talking about this as a rock art program, one of the places that you want to put your rock art is where you see those creatures.
00:20:56
Speaker
You can see them in the rocks. The rocks have shapes, the rocks have particular forms, and the forms of those rocks sometimes mirror the actual forms of the animals. I think back to the creation site in the Tehachapi Mountains, where you can see the rabbit, you can see the raven, you can see the turtle. They're there plain as day.
00:21:24
Speaker
Also, what you see is this portal, this relationship between a nexus that we're going into, we're looking for some means of entering another world. And this particular world is a layered universe, so that if you want to go to the animal underworld,
00:21:50
Speaker
and ask for some help from this Animal Mistress, Animal Master, Supernatural Gamekeeper. You have to do so through some sort of a clefted rock.
00:22:04
Speaker
So if you're a shaman and you want to help someone do that, or if you want to do that yourself, you want to find a rock that's been broken in two and has a distinctive shape and size and cleft in it. And so if you have a split rock, then you have the possibility of a portal.
00:22:25
Speaker
And that's almost always where you're going to find the rock art paintings, the rock art drawings, will be especially abundant and concentrated on these enigmatic, mysterious, clefted rock landforms. Make sense? Yeah, that does.
00:22:45
Speaker
It's really interesting. Again, it goes back to the intimate relationship with the landscape. And I mean, the human brain has always been an amazing pattern recognition device. I mean, we do it now without even thinking about it. But we don't do it as much. I mean, you do it when you look up at the sky and you see shapes in the clouds and constellations and things like that. But when you just live outside and you live with nature at all times, you're going to start seeing
00:23:14
Speaker
patterns where maybe we wouldn't see them today. And of course, that would be rolled into your perspective. And you just segued perfectly because I said the timing of the seasons was measured by the move in the stars. You see the stars and the stars are beings. They're alive. They're sentient. They have agency.
00:23:34
Speaker
The first star you see in the morning is Venus, and it's considered to be the morning star. The last star you see at night is Venus again, and that's considered to be the evening star. Those are the twins. That's a bit of a resurrection. It's a rebirth. It's a renewal process. And those particular stars are then part of a quinsunk, a fiveness
00:24:01
Speaker
which is a key hallmark symbol for the high cultures of Mexico, the Southwest, the Great Basin, all over the world. They have this interconnection looking at a set of symbols that we've talked about before, sort of this box cross symbol that has to do with connections and
00:24:24
Speaker
the upper atmosphere and the lower atmosphere and the center. And the center being a tether, a ladder that runs from the heavens to the underworld. And that particular tether, that particular line is known as an axis mundi or the axis of the world.
00:24:42
Speaker
and that is depicted in the rock art. How do you see it? Well, in the grapevine tradition, you see it as some sort of an E, and they show the different brackets of the different compartments of the universe, the lower, the middle, and the upper. All right. Well, with that, let's take our final break and come back and wrap up this discussion on the other side back in a minute.
00:25:06
Speaker
Welcome back to the Rock Art Podcast, Episode 118. We're talking about Amerindian, which is a hard word to say. I want to talk a little bit more about astronomy, cosmology, things like that, because I know I've definitely talked to people who, even people who are archaeologists, but they find it hard to
00:25:25
Speaker
believe because of our own perspectivism that Native Americans or anybody around the world could have possibly aligned an entire structure or city, if you will, or even something as small as an alignment of rocks to something astronomical like the solstice or something else that is regular and predictable. And I'm like, man, if you just live that every single day, again, it goes back to this perspective of just living that kind of thing every single day and being in it.
00:25:54
Speaker
it becomes more obvious than to people like us who, you know, there's days when people don't go outside. There's days when I don't go outside. You know what I mean? Because I don't have to. It's a terrible day right here down in Mexico. It's been 40 mile an hour winds. I went outside once. I can do that. So there's two sites I want to talk about very quickly.
00:26:16
Speaker
When I've talked about before, it's called Mary's Cave. If Mary's Cave isn't an archaeoastronomical site, it's nothing, because the entire roof of that cave is painted with cosmic elements. It's stars.
00:26:32
Speaker
moons and brights and cosmic this and cosmic that. And so completely enraptured, encased in this particular rock shelter is sort of this cosmological nexus all beautifully ensconced in this cave.
00:26:49
Speaker
And so the archaeologists, when they went in there, one of the first things they did was, wow, this is really quite interesting. And they identified that if you're at that cave during the winter solstice, I think it's sunrise or sunset, the sunrise, and also during the equinox,
00:27:08
Speaker
along the horizon, specifically on the horizon, there's a niche that you can watch and see that sun come up in that absolute niche. And it's there. And that's an absolute alignment. And astronomers spent the better part of, I think it was 20 years studying that site and came up with much more specific evidence, compelling evidence that this is exactly what's going on there.
00:27:32
Speaker
On Mary's Cave, we often talk about relative dating in rock art, and if you see an animal, for example, on rock art that is extinct, well, you know that the rock art must date to at least that point where the animal existed, right? Because they would have known about it.
00:27:48
Speaker
of course, replicating something like that. Now, Mary's cave and these astronomical alignments, I'm thinking of like Serpent Mound in Ohio, where Serpent Mound doesn't quite line up with the solstice, but if you roll it back to some of the other datable elements there, it does, right? Because if you go back thousands of... Yes, he was able to reconstruct precisely the years
00:28:10
Speaker
the particular pattern of years when that particular intersection would be precisely manifested exactly in that notch. And it was back to about AD 1500 and a little bit earlier than that as well. So between AD 1000 and 1500, that sun came up in that notch just precisely there. He was saying that even given the clarity of the horizon in the desert area,
00:28:38
Speaker
He said there's a green burst of solarization that comes when that sun pops up on that horizon. And he has seen it before, so he wanted to make that known. Also, on Walker Pass, in the far southern Sierra, the highest peak in that
00:28:57
Speaker
part of the country. You go to a big split rock up on the hillside and there is a depiction of the sun coming up over that mountain. Well, if you're there, I'm winter solstice sunrise as I was with the native people that are descendants of that tribe that lives there.
00:29:14
Speaker
Lo and behold, that sun just sits right there on top of that peak. And it sits there for about better part of maybe 30 seconds to a minute. And it is precisely sitting on that peak. And this glowing orb pops up and brightens up the entire hillside. It is magnificent. And I'd have to say it's one of the highlights of my life to experience that. Amazing. Wow.
00:29:37
Speaker
It's one thing to see pictures of it. It's another thing to actually be there and wait in the cold dawn, freezing your butt off, waiting. And when is that sun coming up? Why is this light not hitting? It's not going to come up. I don't care. You know, let's go.
00:29:53
Speaker
And finally, it shows up. You can see it creeping, creeping ever so slowly. Then, boom! This giant orb hits and pops up and brightens the entire side of the hillside. Talking about perspectivism and how that changes through time,
00:30:08
Speaker
I don't know if anybody's actually studied this or not, but if you were to look at, say, the rock art in one area, and we know we can infer that certain panels and elements are older than others through various means, but do you know if there's a prevalence? Let's take the COSO rock art of, say, China Lake or something like that, Little Petrogov Canyon. There's so many.
00:30:29
Speaker
Do you see a shift in the focus of the rock art through time? Like maybe there's more animals in this period and more, you know, astronomical elements during this period and things like that. Absolutely. Okay. That's awesome. The earliest rock art that you see like in the Kosos and they've dated it through associations and other ways to date this stuff is a very deeply gouged, almost sculptural rock art that's completely abstract.
00:30:57
Speaker
And that's 10,000 years old, at least, minimum. Then you get this burst of cosmological wonder where you get these decorated animal human figures that are mostly female.
00:31:15
Speaker
And there they are, they are just so finely etched, pecked in beauty. They're big, they're effervescent, they're flamboyant, they're gorgeous. And then the next thing is, from that patterned body, they become solid bodied.
00:31:35
Speaker
They lose the patterning in their torsos and they become solid. After that, when the solid bodies come in, that's when the big corn sheep hunters come in, in a big way. That's when you start seeing them hunting them with ottlottles and then seeing them with bows and arrows.
00:31:55
Speaker
big time for the hunting of big horn sheep because the big horn sheep move in there and then they become the dominant element. No more is it animal human figures, it's the big horn.
00:32:08
Speaker
So then that's the last gasp of when you get larger than life-sized bighorn sheep and you got this whole repertoire going in there, that's the Kosos. And then of course after that, you've got scratching. You've got numbing scratching and the embellishment of this and pictographs, paintings that are all over the place that are relatively recent.
00:32:31
Speaker
So there is definite chapters and different periods and different representations and subject matter and characterizations of the iconography, subject matter, and patterns depicted for different periods of time. So native people often see the natural world as one that's transfixed with power. And that term for power is different in all the different languages of the world, but in the West they call it puha or buha.
00:33:00
Speaker
And this power, this energy, this mojo, it was something that was intertwined with everyday life. It was something that existed as the tapestry of daily existence. It's something that places had power and people had power.
00:33:22
Speaker
and animals had power and varying amounts of that power were important. You could acquire power, you could lose power, and it just depended upon who you were and how much power you had as to how much influence you might have over the supernatural realm.
00:33:42
Speaker
So these rituals, these sacred narratives, these ceremonials, they were partly about trying to benchmark one's existence and deal with sort of this animated world, this interconnected ideology, this web and cycle of life.
Interconnectedness in Native Cultures
00:34:02
Speaker
And
00:34:04
Speaker
Everything about you, everything you saw, you tasted, you touched, was alive with power. Animals, mountains, rocks, caves, springs, lakes, trees, lightning, wind, they all had life in them, agency. They all were sentient beings. They were not simply a metaphor, but every part of the day and every movement was a reality to these people.
00:34:27
Speaker
they could sense it. They would understand or grok or grasp what was going on by testing the waters or getting a sense of what was going on in the universe when they were walking upon the land.
00:34:47
Speaker
To wrap up, how does this knowledge of of perspectivism and through time for different Native American groups help archaeologists understand and study them through our work? Well, when you see pictures on the rocks, I think you get a much deeper sense of what they're trying to communicate. I think if you can grasp even superficially anything from what I've said,
00:35:16
Speaker
then you can at least come to some superficial sense, some sort of tangential way of grasping a minute amount of what is going on in these paintings, these pictures, these panels.
00:35:32
Speaker
They're not just, you know, brick-brack. They're not just, you know, skid-a-marink things. They are embellishments and communications of ancient people that communicate who they were, what they were, their passions, their beliefs, their sacred stories, and they're communicating something to us about their world. Okay.
00:35:55
Speaker
Well, I think with that, we will call it. This is an awesome kind of wrap up to some of the perspectivism focused podcasts that we've had in the last few weeks or the last few episodes, I should say. And it's a never ending conversation, basically.
00:36:10
Speaker
Take a look at your show notes. We've got the link to the archaeology show, the most recent episode that came out just before this one did. Actually, there's probably two. But anyway, it's a link in the show notes, and then we'll have a link to Alan's PowerPoint presentation on this very topic also in the show notes. So with that, I think we'll see you guys next time, and thanks for listening. Take care, gag.
00:36:39
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:37:11
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.