Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Local Indian Rock Art Published in 2009 "Making Pictures in Stone"



Blue slate amulet found locally and published in "Making Pictures in Stone."

"Making Pictures in Stone - American Indian Rock Art of the Northeast," was published by the University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama and written by Edward J, Lenik. Lenik is a registered professional archaeologist and well-known author of several works concerning American Indian Rock Art. The book is an illustrated resource concerning rock art created by the Indians of Northeast America for research purposes. Remarkably, some of the examples used to represent notable rock art in the book is local rock art supplied to the author by the Susquehanna River Archaeological Center (SRAC.)

Rock art is a term used for various forms of human artistic expression by incising, etching, painting, pecking, or otherwise physically changing the faces of rocks or the walls of caves, or simply by moving or piling rocks on the landscape to form a design or pattern. Rock art subsets include petroglyphs, pictographs, engravings, geoglyphs, and petroforms.

The specific rock art from our region that was used in Lenik's recent book includes an animal effigy hearth discovered by Ellsworth Cowles in 1933, a "grid stone" tablet from the Ted Keir/ SRAC Collection, and a blue slate amulet from the Cowles/SRAC collection that is incised with many designs including a wolf or bear figure.

It is both exciting and very significant that our local archaeology is being used as a resource for ongoing research on a national level and this is just the beginning now that SRAC finally has their artifacts accessible to the public at our new Center in Waverly.

Anyone interested in learning more about these artifacts or others found in our region can visit SRAC at 345 Broad Street in Waverly, NY. The Center exhibits thousands of locally found artifacts and is open from 1-5 Tuesdays through Fridays and Saturdays from 11-4pm.





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