LITTLE ROCK — The new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville has vaulted Arkansas to international prominence in the art world, but its heralded collection of masterpieces hardly does justice to the country’s ancient artists.
While the museum focuses on American art from the Colonial era to contemporary times, the artistic history of American Indians goes back thousands of years and survives today in a vast treasure of phenomenal artwork.
Simply put, artistic expression was integral to the cultures of supposedly primitive peoples, including those tribes living along Arkansas’ great rivers more than 1,000 years ago.
“Native Americans were very artistically inclined in all aspects of their lives,” says George Sabo III, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and an expert on the historic art of Arkansas tribes.
The varied aspects included going far beyond utilitarian necessity in fashioning of tools, points, pots, baskets and weavings. It wasn’t enough for an arrowhead to be able to bring down an animal, but also to be fashioned in intricate designs to be a distinctive style of a tribal region.
The highest expression of artistry, however, was exemplified in the pottery, statuary, ceremonial regalia and instruments created especially for spiritual rituals. Depictions of shamans engraved on shell, for example, showed them to be magnificently costumed from head to foot.
In Arkansas, the finest ancient artistry was created by resident tribes like the Quapaws and Caddos during the so-called Mississippian Period, from approximately A.D. 900 to arrival of the European explorers in the 1600s. Superb examples of their legacy can be seen today in the archaeological collection housed in the university’s museum.
Their legacy, however, also survives outdoors and across the stony landscape of the Ozarks in the form of “rock art” consisting of pictographs and petroglyphs found on the faces of bluffs and the walls of rock shelters.
Between pictographs finger-painted on rock and petroglyphs etched in stone, Arkansas claims one of the richest concentrations of rock art found in North America, Sabo says.
Much of his research in recent decades has focused on documenting rock-art sites and studying the meaning and significance of the varied images found.
ROCK ART SITES
“We have now documented rock art at 175 sites, all in the Ozarks, with at least 50 discovered in the past decade,” Sabo says.
They tend to be found in locations such as bluffs at habitation sites near watercourses, in large cavelike rock shelters hidden away in canyons and on outcroppings at lofty locations with expansive views.
They also tend to be associated with unusual geological features like arches and, especially, with brightly colored sandstone, with red being especially favored.
Among the many sites, Petit Jean State Park near Morrilton represents a premier location to view rock art, particularly in the park’s Rock House Cave.
On the walls and ceilings of the cavernous rock shelter, ancient artists mixed naturally occurring minerals like iron oxide with blood or animal fat to paint pictographs and also used the pigments to adorn petroglyphs.
Due to the soft, porous texture of the sandstone and the aging effects of the centuries, the images are not as distinct as they once were, but identifiable examples include a spoonbill catfish next to a woven fish trap, a woodland bison and a human figure with a headdress, as well as sunburst and geometric designs.
The varied images suggest the large rock shelter was an important site for communal rituals, but it is not the only location of rock art within and around Petit Jean State Park.
“There are small rock art sites in secretive and secluded areas of the park that we believe were used for personal rites of passage or vision quests,” Sabo says. “There is also rock art atop nearby Crow Mountain with a glorious view overlooking the Arkansas River Valley.”
The prevalence of pictographs and petroglyphs at Petit Jean initially led the rock art of the Ozarks to be generally termed the “Petit Jean style,” but researchers have since learned differently.
“With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we’ve been able to do much more thorough research of the sites across the Ozarks, sending larger teams of archaeologists to spend more time studying the composition and details of the images in changing light conditions; we’ve learned a lot in the past decade,” Sabo says.
As an example, he noted that human images that could appear static in daylight could seem to come “alive” in flickering firelight.
In the big picture, comparative research has determined four distinctive styles of rock art relative to different areas of the Ozarks in the same way styles like realism and impressionism are manifested in modern art.
Where the Osage tribe once held sway in the western Ozarks, for example, the rock art shows influences from the Plains and Southwestern styles of images.
The comparative study between rock art and handmade artifacts has also shown the images on stone were also frequently replicated in pottery and ceremonial regalia.
“What we’ve been able to do is look at the different styles to understand the distribution of different communities and how they used their art to put their signature on the landscape,” Sabo says. COMMON MOTIFS
Regardless of style, the myriad images of rock art display many common motifs, such as an association with the cosmic heavenly realm represented by pictographs of the sun and moon and sky.
Also common are important game animals like buffalo, deer and rabbits. Since the tribes typically dwelled along rivers and streams, aquatic creatures also abound, including beaver, otter, fish and turtles.
Besides terrestrial and aquatic creatures, there are images of subterranean species like snakes and spiders.
The animals are also commonly depicted in relation to their respective habitats, such as aquatic creatures associated with wavy lines to indicate a stream of water.
Sabo says the images taken as a whole indicate the tribal communities had a very good understanding of their environment.
As an example, one Petit Jean pictograph of particular interest to the anthropologist depicted a fiddlehead fern shown in an early growth stage when its curled head resembles the head of a fiddle.
“In its curled stage in early spring, the fern is edible and delicious, but is poisonous and dangerous to consume in its mature stage; the Indians would have known that,” Sabo says.
Another common motif of rock art was the prevalence of human figures, of which the most striking are individual “shaman” figures often depicted in dance poses and wearing with some type of headdress and holding ceremonial objects.
The human images are also frequently portrayed in groups, sometimes with interlocked arms suggesting participation in communal rituals.
In a symbolic fashion, the poses are illustrative of the sort of line dancing seen today during ceremonial gatherings of North American tribes.
Altogether, the clear association of rock art with rituals affirms the deep strain of spirituality in the Indian cultures.
SPECIAL PLACES
From a personal perspective, Sabo’s enlightenment fostered in me a greater appreciation on my initial introduction to rock art in Northwest Arkansas a decade ago during a tour of select sites led by Jerry Hilliard, an archaeologist with the Arkansas Archeological Survey at the University of Arkansas.
One site was Brown Bluff located on the west side of Interstate 540 near Chester and virtually in the shadow of a high bridge on the interstate. Named for the color of its sandstone and set back from the banks of a flowing creek, the massive bluff was a habitation site where an ancient people left their mark in the form of pictographs.
The human and animal figures were small and red and strung out along a single layer of smooth sandstone about 10 inches thick.
More impressive was a collection of petrogylphs in a large rock shelter of rust colored sandstone in the Ozark National Forest near Mountainburg. Located at a place known as The Narrows, the secluded rock shelter was tucked under the lip of a ridge facing a spectacular panorama stretching toward the Arkansas River Valley.
With smooth walls curving up toward a high ceiling, the cavelike room featured 15 human figures etched low on a rear wall. Standing 12 to 18 inches in a close grouping, some figures were posed with their arms in different positions, while others had their arms linked.
The largest was a shaman figure wearing what seemed to be a feathered headdress and holding some sort of object in each hand. It was easy to imagine how the figure might seem to “dance” in flickering firelight.
The most striking and certainly most infamous petroglyph site visited was on private property on the Mulberry River near Cass where a massive and unusual uplift of blood-red sandstone must have certainly had a powerful impact on ancient people who considered red to be a mystical color.
Unfortunately, the petroglyphs etched into the crimson stone were misinterpreted by early settlers as being carved by Spanish conquistadors as clues to the location of a gold mine. The sandstone formation was subsequently riddled with tunnels during the early 1900s in a vain search for gold, destroying many of the petroglyphs in the process.
Sabo says many of the known rock art sites in Arkansas are located on private property, but he is encouraged by the interest of most landowners in protecting and preserving the images.
Much rock art, of course has been lost, such as the many sites documented along the White River in the 1930s but since submerged beneath the waters of Beaver, Table Rock and Bull Shoals lakes.
Nevertheless, Sabo believes there are new discoveries to be made in the Ozarks by people attuned to the presence of rock art and the kind of places where it is likely to be found.
Style, Pages 45 on 03/18/2012