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Ghost Dance Rock Art and Theology - Rock Art 36
223 Plays4 years ago
The ghost dance was a revitalistic movement that was most popular in the 1870s and 1890s. The religious leaders of the ghost dance movement were religious specialists who dreamed a prophetic vision. That vision included that the world was to be remade over and that the dead would come back to life and the world would returnTo the way it was before your Americans entered their lands. To usher in that New World native people were to dance around dance for several days day and night and that by praying and dancing and singing this would bring in a new world of peace and prosperity.
Anthropologist and archaeologist have identified about two dozen rock art sites that appear to commemorate or document this time of the religious movement of the ghost dance. He’s historic paintings are in many colors and depict dancers and the return of animals and plants and the return of the dead. The paintings also document and portray the principal religious beliefs of now the participants in the movement which include a layered cosmos a depiction of the Thunderbird BighornSheep and other animals and a central white horse image.
Links
Contact
- Chris Webster
- chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Dr. Alan Garfinkel
- avram1952@yahoo.com
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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
00:00:19
Speaker
and in Baja California. 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. So for more
Call for Support and Donations
00:00:43
Speaker
info,
00:00:43
Speaker
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.
Episode 36 Overview: The Ghost Dance
00:01:34
Speaker
Welcome to the Rock Art Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel, doing the Rock Art Podcast, episode number 36. And we're going to talk about the ghost dance. Ghost dance rock art, what the ghost dance is, what it meant to the native people, and how that translates into their remarkable rock art during the 1870s and 1890s.
00:02:03
Speaker
All right, everybody. Welcome to Episode 36. Alan, how's it going? It's going great. Good. I love working with the Archaeology Podcast Network. I love having our Rock Art podcast. And it's quite remarkable that we're on the 36th hour of our interaction here. You wouldn't think there'd be that much to talk about on Rock Art, did you?
00:02:29
Speaker
I know practically two full days of listening pleasure. So there you go. Yes. You can sit there and, uh, and just listen to your heart's content about many different individuals. We have people from, uh, Mexico and all over all of United States and.
00:02:46
Speaker
talking
Understanding the Ghost Dance Movement
00:02:47
Speaker
about everything under the sun from archeo astronomy to cognitive neuroscience to geoglyphs, rock art, dating, all the above. Yeah. Yeah. Well, on this episode, uh, we're going to talk about something that we've mentioned before on this podcast. In fact, just last week, but also I think probably it's come up in other podcasts, but it's ghost dance rock art. So let's set the stage and just
00:03:13
Speaker
Where are we talking about in the world first off? And then we'll get into what Ghost Dance is. The Ghost Dance itself is called a messianic movement. Messianic means sort of a revitalization movement. In anthropologies, it means people were going through a crisis, a crisis in being affected in a very bad way, both from their numbers being depleted,
00:03:41
Speaker
and their food and environment being adversely affected. The ghost dance arose in eastern California, or the very edge of western Nevada, and there were two different expressions of it. One was in 1870, an individual named Tevibo, and then in 1890, another individual that may or may not have been related to Tevibo,
00:04:08
Speaker
became the ghost dance Messiah as well. Wait, we know, so we know the names of the people who came up with this. That seems like a pretty rare phenomenon in archeology. Yes. Yes. See the, oh, oh, stance itself is probably, I'd say confidently, one of the most studied anthropological chapters in the history of religious intensification in the world.
00:04:35
Speaker
there is a tremendous amount written about this phenomenon and quite an enormous array of documentation. So it's considered a classic. You hear about it in many different anthropology courses and they talk about the goat's dance religion and the experiences of this revitalization movement and the effects of that phenomenon and the historical
00:05:05
Speaker
accounts
Colonization and Indigenous Cultural Responses
00:05:06
Speaker
that dealt with it. It's perceived in anthropological perspective as something along the lines of what we call a messianic cult or a vitalistic movement, et cetera, et cetera. And these sorts of movements have occurred historically throughout the world when a culture, an indigenous culture for the most part, is going through a catastrophic period.
00:05:34
Speaker
And that catastrophic period is usually from, you can call it colonization or colonialism, the effects of sort of a dominant culture. Usually it's a Western industrial culture on indigenous people that are simpler or have a less robust technology and economy and socio-political organization.
00:06:00
Speaker
Does any of that make any sense? Yeah. That's actually making me think because I've, I've heard you lecture on ghost dance before we did a video thing, you know, on, on ghost dance. And I didn't actually realize that it was more of a concept and not something unique to the area and people that we're talking about because I mean, you're talking about this, this ghost dance
00:06:22
Speaker
phenomenon abstractly right now as a thing that happens, you know, that a culture does at a certain point in time when outside influences are, are happening. Um, so my first question is, you know, before we start talking about like the Eastern Mojave, you know, Western Southern Nevada area, where else do we have proof that this kind of thing has, has happened? Like, like this type of rock art and this type of theology. Well, some, some famous examples are a thing called the cargo cult. Oh yeah. I don't know if you were,
00:06:52
Speaker
But there was a native group that was being affected in a variety of ways from Western industrial people. And this was the first time this saw. And they, in turn, saw the incredible sophistication and technology of aviation, and hadn't seen that before. And then they learned more about this faraway place called America.
00:07:22
Speaker
And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the president at the time. And so some kind of crustacean, some gifts, some things were dropped on them to help them in terms of accommodating some of the issues they were having in terms of food and in terms of medicine and what have you. And so they began to think that this particular phenomenon was religiously inspired and was from some sort of a
00:07:51
Speaker
a deity on high. And they felt that, well, since we saw these incredible winged birds, maybe we'll just construct one. And they would understand who we are and mimic that phenomenon. So they made out of native wood, depictions of these airplanes. And, and they, and
00:08:17
Speaker
became religious phenomenon that they hope would mirror these other phenomenon and bring the cargo, the gifts and the blessings that this nation or deity bring it back to them. And they developed an entire religious tradition and sets of ceremonies relating to this phenomenon.
00:08:42
Speaker
It's called the cargo cult. In other instances, certainly closer to home, and I use this when I talk about it, think about 9-11 and when we were invaded by these adverse exotic pressures of individuals of a different religious persuasion or intent on affecting us in a very dramatic way.
00:09:10
Speaker
and causing death in mayhem. Well, what happened was that death in mayhem certainly sparked a fervor, certainly a religious fervor and identification fervor, where I would say nationalism or American independence or what would you call it, sort of this American individualism prospered.
00:09:40
Speaker
And people were going back to church. They were praying. It was this whole extension. One of the more interesting aspects that relate back to what we're going to talk about today is people began to represent themselves and want to identify themselves as loyal and patriotic Americans. So what did they do when they needed to do that?
00:10:04
Speaker
Hmm. I'm asking you, Chris Webster. I don't know. They bought a flag. Yeah. I guess so. I think we ran out of flags. And what happened was it was a run on flags and we ran out of them. We couldn't have, we couldn't produce enough of them. And the companies that did produce them literally rained their inventory. Yeah. So the reason I bring that up is because it's a sign. It has meaning.
00:10:34
Speaker
It's a design element that in turn signifies the identification and the cultural ethos of America.
00:10:45
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. Not so different. Not so different. No, no. So that's really interesting because I thought we were going to equate like the ghost dance phenomenon that we're going to talk about with like rock art, but really it's, it's multiple expressions that are possible when this sort of pressure and this sort of interaction take place. So it can be in any number of ways. So that makes sense. Part of it, I would call a religious intensification and a ceremonial intensification.
00:11:15
Speaker
and also an artistic or representational or identification, almost an ethnic signature or a nationalistic signature of the people. So all of that sort of wraps around this kind of discussion. So way back in Eastern California, back in 1870 and 1890, there was a religious fervor
00:11:43
Speaker
and individuals, individuals that both were shamans, medicine men, that existed, that went through certain experiences that were pretty much associated again with the same phenomenon that shaman have specifically experienced throughout their lives. One was wavoca and one was tvibo. They lived out in Eastern California. They were Paiutes.
00:12:13
Speaker
They were on a particular reservation, but living pretty simple lives. And both of them went through this same phenomenon where they had a vision. They went through and both were very ill and went through sort of a near-death experience. And the vision that they both perceived was that the catastrophic circumstances
00:12:42
Speaker
brought on by Euro-Americans vis-a-vis the adverse infliction of pain, be it death, dying, disease, the loss of resources, the loss of lands, at every level, the effects of this incredible, powerful nation of colonizing and using and usurping the area that they had
00:13:12
Speaker
known as their homelands for literally centuries and thousands of years was being destroyed before their very eyes. And during these periods that were highly extreme, that's when these prophets, these messiahs, these medicine persons came to expression. Now the visions that they both had were very similar. The visions were that
00:13:42
Speaker
there would come a time supernaturally that the world would be made over. So that there would be a new world which would envelop or cover over the old world as the current world. And that new world would recover all of the traditional elements
00:14:09
Speaker
that were lost because of the damage done by the intrusion of this exotic culture. So we would see the animals come back. We'd see the plants and the landscape. We would see the damage that was done through mining, and the waters would be fouled, et cetera. And as well, the reason they call it the ghost dance is that the ancestors and the relatives
00:14:39
Speaker
had passed away and died because of the influx of either disease or literally murder decimation would come back from the dead. They would be revived. They would be reborn and come back again to live. In one instance, that would mean that the Euro-Americans, the white people would vanish.
00:15:09
Speaker
They would go away. There would be no more white people. In the others, the more recent one is that the white people would come to know the native people and there would be a peaceful coexistence. So that was kind of the basis of that philosophy, that religious sort of expression. The worldview or the cosmology of those religious
00:15:39
Speaker
How's that? Okay. Well, that sounds like a good spot to take a break. And on the other side, we'll come back and talk about exactly what that expression looked like back in a minute. All right. Welcome back to the rock art podcast episode 36. So we set the stage. We know what's going on here. What did this expression that we're talking about look like to the people of the 1870s and nineties? Well, one of the things that looked like was that the Indians were
00:16:09
Speaker
in an uprising and that they were through subterfuge and collaboration, planning on something that would affect the more dominant people. So Americans, Euro Americans, the military, and certainly the settlers were very, very wary and didn't like all of this. They, they were scared. What would go on?
00:16:38
Speaker
is the native people would get together, a number of them, hundreds of them, and they would have a ceremony at night that would go on for, I don't know, three, four, five, six days or longer, and they would dance. They would dance, they would sing, they would do what they call a round dance, and they would feast on the various things that people would bring, and they would pray.
00:17:04
Speaker
they would pound the ground and ask the creator to come to them and bring things back to the way they were. And that was the expression or the manifestation, the rituals and the cosmology that were associated with this religious period of intensification. There was a woman named Judith van der
00:17:29
Speaker
who did a multi-decadal research with some native people about this ghost dance religion. And she wrote two books, very, very lengthy books on the poetry and the music, the worldview and music and the verbiage that was associated with this phenomenon, this religion, the ghost dance religion.
00:17:59
Speaker
The second volume was 700 pages long. And literally she spent decades and decades listening to all the songs and transcribing them and peering deeply into the cosmology, the metaphor, the understanding of how these beautiful
00:18:23
Speaker
pictures, these word pictures that were placed in the songs, how that related back to the basic tenets of indigenous thought. So that particular series of books and that research has been
00:18:40
Speaker
hugely helpful to me in terms of understanding rock art, because it provided me with sort of the cognitive map of the universe of native people, call them Numic, Great Basin, Paiute, Shoshone. And it really was a tour de force on those particular concepts, if that makes any sense. Yeah. When, when again, you may have said at the beginning, but I was listening about the book, when was that written?
00:19:09
Speaker
That was written back in the 70s. And really they had one chance to interview a couple of women who when they were very, very young had been very active as ghost dance, religionists. And so they were able to resurrect and bring to the fore all of these songs that they had remembered from so many years ago. And it wasn't an easy exercise, but they
00:19:37
Speaker
They remembered what they were and they talked about the words of the song and what that meant to them spiritually, physically, you know, from a conceptual standpoint, even from a philosophical or religious perspective as well.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah. So man, I mean, first off, just having that like physical living connection to, you know, the history and the archaeology is just amazing. So you have the songs and we have the, you know, the experiences that were that were collected, you know, from the people who were there doing it. But how does this all relate to rock art? How do we bring this back to what was the expression on the, you know, on the landscape? Well, one of the people who are the pioneers in this was a colleague of mine,
00:20:23
Speaker
named Robert Schiffman who taught at Bakersfield College. He had his master's degree and he studied anthropology and archaeology and he was someone who was really a visionary, very prescient in terms of his ability to see things before they were really manifested in the literature. And he got me together with another very well-known internationally respected researcher and recognized that
00:20:52
Speaker
The paintings, the colorful paintings that were found in eastern California, some of them certainly were ghost dance related. And he argued that quite extensively. And we put out a volume back in 1983, I believe it was, that was on ghost dance rock art of eastern California. And that was a very early pioneering statement
00:21:21
Speaker
on the nature and character.
00:21:23
Speaker
of this kind of rock art. There was a number of researchers that all put in this volume, including those that had visited the sites and those that had documented the sites, et cetera. And there was, I don't know, 10, 20 different sites that I knew and others knew existed in this Eastern California prism that manifested these phenomenon
00:21:53
Speaker
and seemed to have elements, basically designs and images that seemed to fit this kind of thinking. And then after that there was another famous individual, his name is Richard Stoffel, and he produced an extensive article that appeared in Current Anthropology
00:22:17
Speaker
which is a worldwide journal. And again, he documented both from a native standpoint and an archaeological standpoint what he felt to be a ghost dance rock art site that existed on the Kaobab Plateau in the Grand Canyon. What does it look like? How do you differentiate a ghost dance site from some other rock art site? What are some of the characteristics that we're looking for here?
00:22:42
Speaker
First of all, they're historic. So that'll, yeah, that'll not prehistoric as opposed to. And so they date to somewhere between 1870 and 1890, a few years before a few years after they're also colorful. They're usually polychrome. They're in white, red, black, orange, yellow, et cetera.
00:23:05
Speaker
They have a vitality about them. And you also can, in essence, read them. They will be showing dancers. They'll be showing thunderbird motifs.
00:23:21
Speaker
They'll be showing bighorn sheep animals. They'll also be showing a situation where the painting itself, besides being just a composition, it's a message. It's like a cognitive map of the ghost dance. The most famous site to do this is in Penament City, and that's up on the
00:23:47
Speaker
you know, up above the Panamint Valley. There used to be an historic gold mine town there and over a thousand people lived there. Well, I believe either after or before that city existed, the native people took the time and energy to produce
00:24:05
Speaker
a very, very elaborate composition that has hundreds of elements in them in many different colors. And it shows sort of the, I know I've used the word cosmology, worldview, it shows the religious precepts of this ghost dance. So first of all, in Udo Aztec and cosmology, in this great base in Paiute Shoshone world,
00:24:33
Speaker
It was a world that was stratified, a layered universe. And I know I've talked about this before, but the universe, the spatial realm of the native people
00:24:46
Speaker
was tiered. Okay. So the highest realm of the universe and the most sacred was sort of a sky world. All right. And that sky world was one peopled by and populated by
00:25:06
Speaker
and depicted as the color white. Why was it white? Well, there's the sun, there's clouds, there's rain, there's thunder, there's lightning, there's smoke, there's snow, there's fog. Also, when you think about elements that are sacred, you think about the underbelly or the under feathers of the eagle, the white feathers, and also the white rum patch. So,
00:25:32
Speaker
The eagle, of course, is the shamanistic ancestor bird that is sort of the chief of that world, or the thunderbird. The thunderbird was an animal that, of course, was associated with rain, thunder, and renewal.
00:25:52
Speaker
as the bighorn sheep was as well. So that's the uppermost. Then the next level is yellow. It's composed of sort of the bighorn sheep, but also the mountain lion. And that's because of the color, sort of a yellow or tawny picture. After that comes the foothills in green or blue, and that's the wolf. The earth is red because the red soil,
00:26:19
Speaker
and on that earthly plane are people.
00:26:24
Speaker
And that's the valley floor. And that's where people live. And red is seen as a color of life because of blood, but it's also a color of joy. And the specific animals that live in this liminal, liminal meaning on the edge between two things are the quail, are the turtle, are the chuckawala.
00:26:54
Speaker
And of course, most importantly, the rattlesnake. And so these creatures can be seen on the surface, but in the underworld as well. And they're sort of the ceremonial guardians of this world. And that color, of course, is black.
00:27:14
Speaker
So when you look at the pictures of some of these ghost dance rock art sites, they mirror this cosmological realm. In other words, if you look at the Panaman City painting,
00:27:28
Speaker
White is at the top, yellow is intermediate, red is at the bottom, and then below at the very lowest levels are black. So they're mirroring the imagery that they believe is consonant or characteristic of their celestial view, sort of this stratum, this multi-tiered view of the world. Is that enough?
00:27:59
Speaker
That's a lot of verbiage. I was wondering too, is some of this, uh, some of this mechanical, you know what I mean? Like saying, uh, white was the upper color, but was white just like easier to make than light blue? You know what I mean?
00:28:17
Speaker
Could it be that simple sometimes? Yes, it could be. White is very simple to make. And white, of course, is a gypsum. And white was also seen that the actual pigment itself was viewed as valuable and magical. Red pigment, in fact, was even more magical and more curative. They would ingest it. They would smear it on their bodies.
00:28:46
Speaker
Native people believe that this in time would
00:28:49
Speaker
would protect them or keep them healthy and away from being sick. So in fact, in fact, the Messiah Wavoca would send red pigment by mail all over the nation and around the world. And he would get money in return for that pigment. And he was perceived as being a very prestigious and influential and politically adept leader of this movement.
00:29:20
Speaker
Okay. Let's take another break and then come back on the other side and, uh, wrap up this discussion and find out, find out where they went and, and with this whole thing and how long it lasted and, and, uh, and maybe why they stopped. So let's talk about that in segment three back in a minute, or as Alan would say, we'll see you on the flip flop flip flop.
00:29:41
Speaker
I almost forgot it. Here we go. All right. Welcome back to episode 36 of the rock art podcast. So, all right. So we've, we've talked about what kicked off this ghost dance theology, back from black and red way to say that. And some of what it looks like with the colors and the expression and the rock art and the songs and the dance and
00:30:05
Speaker
And I'm curious as to, first off, we mentioned in the beginning two prominent practitioners in the 1870 and around 1890 or so. But were they, like, what was the movement like? Were lots of people getting behind it?
00:30:20
Speaker
I mean, I can presume how it ended. Like it didn't work. You know what I mean? People probably got disheartened and I mean, if it had worked, you and I wouldn't be sitting here talking like this today. We would be somewhere else or doing something else, right? So clearly Europeans did not get kicked out. They did, you know, the dead did not come back to life. So did they just get disheartened and ended? We'll talk about that in a minute, but let's talk about 1870 to 1890 and then the kind of a resurgence in 1890. The 1870 ghost dance
00:30:50
Speaker
was extremely popular in California, but it didn't move really outside of the California Western Nevada period. And it lasted for about, let's say 10 years. There was a movement about a decade and then it bubbled, it sort of fizzed for a bit and then
00:31:16
Speaker
The 1890 element was initiated. The reason it became popular in 1870 is that was
00:31:25
Speaker
the most hellish time for native Native Americans. It was the time where there was starvation. It was decimation. There was an incredible drought. Cattle were dying by the thousands and I'm sure that other. So there was a, it was really a cataclysmic time. So the 1870s, you know, 1880s, that's also, and then of course in 1890 kicks in,
00:31:54
Speaker
and adding insult to injury, you've got the gold rush, right? So that adds another layer to it all as well. But the 1870s expression was very regional, very insular, and really did not
00:32:16
Speaker
did not go far afield from its origin point just throughout, let's say, the greater parts of California. 1890s with WAVOCA was totally different. We're talking about an internationally famous phenomenon went pan-national all over the United States. People picked it up. It was the time of the trains.
00:32:42
Speaker
Native people could ride the trains, and then so our prophet would ride the trains and visit other tribes. The mail system was active. And so there was a tremendous interchange of information, and people traveled extensively to visit the prophet.
00:33:07
Speaker
and learn more about it. And so it was picked up as a phenomenon all over the United States. And even around the world knew about it because there were other groups that had heard about this, anthropologists, archaeologists, indigenous people, what have you. And so it went global.
00:33:31
Speaker
So yeah. So what was that? What was that effect? I mean, most people don't know about this right now. So they do. And they don't. Most people, when you, when you talk about bury my heart at wounded knee, they immediately know about it because at wounded knee,
00:33:48
Speaker
was when the ghost dance heyday was at its apex. And when the cavalry came in there and massacred the native people. And so if you go if you go to the museums, you can see the bullet holes in the ghost and shirts. And that put sort of put the benchmark and the tombstone
00:34:17
Speaker
in part on this phenomenon. Now that being said, ghost dances continue to this day.
00:34:26
Speaker
But the native people will tell you no. It's a secret. Yes, because they know what happened the last time and they don't want anybody else to know about it. But they do continue to dance and do continue to follow this phenomenon and this sort of epistemology.
00:34:48
Speaker
theology and there are ghost dance activities that still to this very day occur in California. I know that for a fact because a native person told me that. Do you know, and it's entirely possible that we don't know this because they, you know, they want to keep it obviously and rightly so to themselves, but do we know if it's more in, because it's such a long history of it, they're used to it. It's more of a religion now, or is it more of like in solidarity or are they still expecting
00:35:17
Speaker
all the non-native Americans to be expelled from the country? I think it's solidarity, I think it's identity, I think it's history. There's something about
00:35:31
Speaker
revering the ancestors and connections with the ancestors that are especially relevant to native people. Now, the only way I can really explain it is to think about, and I've done this before on this program, but please put up with me. It's similar to Catholics.
00:35:50
Speaker
when they talk about connecting to the saints or to their dead relatives and asking them to intercede to the creator and try to win or somehow reconcile themselves for blessings from deities, if you understand what I'm saying. They perceive that the dead are still alive
00:36:16
Speaker
they're in heaven or in some other world and they have a special, special realm and a special position that they can in fact help or aid in the
00:36:31
Speaker
connection to a higher power that will enforce or bless or affect what's going on on this earth in a positive way. How's that? That makes sense. Yeah. And it makes sense that, you know, native peoples or anybody really that goes through something for multiple decades and, uh, and really gets into it, that it would cement itself in
00:36:57
Speaker
the culture, you know, and it's the reasons for it and the way that it's expressed and how you, you know, how you basically go about it would morph and change over time. So that totally makes sense to me.
00:37:12
Speaker
Let me jump to some interesting things here. There's certain elements that occur in these pictures, in these paintings. Men on horseback, some with stetson hats, others with guns. They're almost rendered in white or black. Guns are important because of the ghost dance belief of invulnerability from bullets. Also the sound of rifle fire was metaphorically made equivalent to thunderclaps.
00:37:38
Speaker
Yeah. Also, one of the more interesting discoveries that I made in this, I'll try to talk about this very briefly, is that I call it the tale of the tales. You remember this, the bighorn sheep? Yeah, I do. When you look at this all over the far west and you study how bighorn sheep are depicted in the rock drawings, which are more ancient than these ghost dance paintings,
00:38:08
Speaker
The tails are either horizontal to the ground, parallel, or they're up in the air. And when I've studied this and written something on this and found others that have discovered the same thing, it's a visual shorthand. It's a shortcut to communicate reproductive symbolism. I'm open for reproduction. I want to see fertility, et cetera.
00:38:36
Speaker
It's a particular posture called flagging. Bighorn sheep do this, as domestic sheep do. And when they're in estrus, they show the male sheep, the ram, that they are open for reproduction and they are fertile. So it's called flagging.
00:38:58
Speaker
Now, when we look at the paintings, what particular posture or are the tales of all of these animal figures on the paintings? I imagine they would be down.
00:39:12
Speaker
They're down. They're down because they're emerging from the underworld and being resurrected as though they were dead and then coming back up. So it's a visual metaphor for the resurrection and the rebirth and the repopulation
00:39:33
Speaker
of the world, so it became more natural, a renewal of the Earth. Make sense? Yeah. Yeah, that does make sense. The other thing that occurs is one of the dominant central elements is a white zoomorph.
00:39:50
Speaker
a white animal and I couldn't figure out what the heck that was until I used de-stretch which was a way to sort of focus in on the elements and see the invisible and there's a man on this white zoom wharf holding the reins of a horse. Well this white horse symbolism is a prophetic figure in the 1870 and 1890 ghost dance and
00:40:14
Speaker
The Paiute story tells of an ancient messiah, a prophet. The elders tell us it's an Indian man who rode down from the north on a white horse, and they call him the Rainmaker. And he took for himself a native bride, and he rode up to heaven on that white horse. That Rainmaker was a stranger, had a long white beard, and he wore a hat, a white hat.
00:40:38
Speaker
So he rode on this white horse, bigger than the regular ones, and the horse was just like a ghost. It would fly across the landscape so quickly. Now, this rainmaker's white horse would travel all across the country, so its hooves would barely touch the ground.
00:40:56
Speaker
The white horse knew all the water holes by heart, and that horse would stop to drink. And the meaning of the story and centrality of water, of course, is an illusion to rebirth and reproductivity and fertility and all of that. Now, this rainmaker was also a gambler that loved beautiful women.
00:41:16
Speaker
And so he loved to play in these native hand games. So he found himself a gorgeous woman, the best looking girl of the tribe, took him on his magical white horse and demanded from the from the host of this game, treasures, meat, venison, whatever they had. When his demands were not met, he became angry and he made a brainstorm.
00:41:37
Speaker
So he made it rain and then he took the Indian girl back up to heaven. He ascended to the stars and a torrential rain came down again. This is all part of the sort of the rain making theology that's associated with the ghost dance. Okay. Wow. That's that's something sounds like describing like Gandalf, the wizard from Lord of the Rings, not to geek out too much.
00:42:06
Speaker
No, exactly. But it's such a visual shorthand. It's so picturesque. And that's what appears on these paintings, a central white horse.
00:42:20
Speaker
Right. All right. Well, in just the last minute or two that we have, I got to ask about dating because obviously we know when these things were made, but does that, does the knowing pretty much, I mean, archeologically speaking, exactly when these things are made down to the, you know, decade, if not the year.
00:42:38
Speaker
Does that help us in understanding some dating methods for some even older stuff when we can look at these and we know when they dated too, and we can use some techniques on them to sort of verify those dates. Does that help us with dating older stuff that we don't have this kind of information about? Well, I would, I would of course love to say yes, but no. The only way we know about the dates or the ages of these things. Not that simple. No, it's because the paint is so fresh. It comes off with your fingers.
00:43:08
Speaker
Literally, it's fresh, fresh 1870, 1890 ghost dance paintings. And the paint is smeared on the rocks. And because it's historic and so recent, it looks very different from more ancient rock paintings.
00:43:28
Speaker
that become part of the rock stratum and are saturated. See what I mean? Yeah. Probably looks like an oil painting or something. It's more recent ones. It does. It comes across as an oil painting rather than a standard pictograph, a stone rock painting. So yeah. And I've thought about trying to date them with the pigment, but I don't think that would be very effective because the sigma, the plus or minus value,
00:43:58
Speaker
would be so great that it wouldn't help me. So one last thing. My first piece of research that I published was on a ghost dance rock art site. And they told me that they thought it was a fraud that someone had just used commercial pigment and tried to copy a native rock art site. I didn't believe that. So I got some pigment that had fallen off the rock. It was on the ground.
00:44:25
Speaker
And I ran it through trace element analysis. They call it X-ray fluorescence. And this was early on in my career, and I sent it off to a laboratory. What I learned was that commercial pigment had a different set of trace elements. And so I can differentiate the indigenous pigment from the commercial pigment, even when I'm talking about the early 1900s versus the late 1850s, et cetera.
00:44:54
Speaker
And lo and behold, it was native pigment. It was not commercial pigment. And the white was the one that would show that most specifically because commercial white pigment has a different chemistry to it. So that's kind of cool. That's kind of cool. It is. But looking at the late 1800s and even early 1900s,
00:45:16
Speaker
I mean, wouldn't the Native Americans possibly had access to some sort of commercial-style pigment rather than making their own, or would that have gone against the theology of it? No, yes, they would, but that would go directly against the theology, because they wanted the native... Traditional methods. The native pigment, the actual stone from the earth, because that was alive.
00:45:42
Speaker
To them, it had power. It had sentience. It had life. And that red rock or that white rock was a healing, sacred, medicinal, powerful, symbolically meaningful.
00:45:59
Speaker
Right. Okay. Well, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah, but that's a good question. All right. Well, I think that's about it. Thanks everybody for listening and we'll come back next time. And if you got any questions about this, which I'm sure some people have many questions about this, please contact us through the show notes at arc pod net.com forward slash rock art forward slash
00:46:21
Speaker
36. You can always email me chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Alan's contact info is in the show notes as well. So, you know, get ahold of us, drop your questions on the right on the website there. You can just comment straight on the episode if you want. So send us those questions and we'll be back next week with, you know, something else equally fascinating. Adios amigos and podcast land. Have a great week.
00:46:55
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. You can find this podcast on the educational podcast app Lyceum, L-Y-C-E-U-M, and wherever you find podcasts. 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.
00:47:35
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. 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.