00:00.00 archpodnet Welcome back to episode 85 of the rock art podcast and I'm talking to Allen about his latest work regarding these pointed petroglyphs that we talked about in the first segment so you've put together with some co-authors a book published by the California Rock Art Foundation None who's helped you write this who are your co-authors on this ah on this work. 00:20.57 Alan Well, the co-authors are um, one of professor emeritus from Fullerton California state university fullerton his name is Bernard Jones he's a tremendous researcher who's published extensively on work in. Both the american southwest and some of its relationships with Mexico and he's also an artist in his own right? and also a very ah detailed scholar when it comes to shamanism. He um, actually was an apprentice to a a native american shaman. 00:46.35 archpodnet No. 01:00.00 Alan And he's very very knowledgeable about the whole practice and the whole associations and cosmology and implications of what shamanism is for native americans the None individual is Ryan Gersner and he helped with some of the research at little lake. 01:10.58 archpodnet On. 01:19.18 Alan And he just completed his master's degree at little Lake demonstrating or at least supporting what I would call the hunting of bighorn sheep with a number of hunting blinds that exist there that are in association with rock art panels. 01:22.35 archpodnet Um. 01:38.93 Alan They're above the lake on the little Lake overlook which is rather amazing. 01:43.33 archpodnet Yeah, for sure and so what prompted this what prompts of this publication at this point in time I Know you've had an interest in this for a long time. But but why now. 01:55.40 Alan Um, you know it wasn't anything that that I planned on developing. Um it was something that organically grew it was originally going to be an article and then it got too long to be an article. 02:08.12 archpodnet No. 02:14.58 Alan And then as we delved deeper and deeper. There was more and more data and more and more visuals. Ah Bernard Jones does pointillism as it's called so he spends a tremendous amount of time replicating the images. And studying them in and in very very minute detail to pick up all the information. Both sufficient and almost the the ah faint images as well. And so as we began doing this. It became rather transparent that. 02:43.64 archpodnet Ah. 02:50.62 Alan Were on to some incredible discoveries and they were very very worthy of sharing publicly and I had I had the whole paper written about a year or two ago. What I thought was going to be an article that would appear somewhere. Ah Bernard Jones came along. He read it. And said well this is good Alan but I think I can make it better I said okay give it a try he and I totally rewrote the entire ah manuscript and it went from I don't know none a dozen pages to about. 03:21.53 archpodnet Ah. 03:28.98 Alan I don't know 40 or 50 pages long with maybe a couple None minimum references and I think there's about 30 or 40 figures in this paper so it it got to be rather huge yeah. 03:41.24 archpodnet Um, Wow Yeah dear. 03:48.71 Alan And very complex. But um, it was an opportunity for us to sort of riff as I say on um, Imagery animal Human Imagery Some of the anthropomorphic imagery as Well. And to examine kind of what the coso people may have been thinking about and delving into and what their religious precepts may have been involved with how's that. 04:23.54 archpodnet That's great. Yeah, and one of the things I alluded to in the end of the last segment was about dating of rock card and I know there's been some advancements and some things you guys are discussing in this book relating to the dating of some of these panels can you tell us a little bit about. How you did that and what the results were. 04:42.87 Alan Well we had some rather special circumstances here. None of all because of the notoriety of coso worldwide this rock art tradition I had 2 different researchers. 04:54.10 archpodnet Um. 04:58.95 Alan Who at different periods of time over the course of the last Decade ah experiment using ah portable x-ray fluorescence and examine the glyphs and and date them. So. 05:08.77 archpodnet Um, right. 05:16.18 Alan None instance gave me the actual pinpoint ages plus or minus maybe 20% on a number of these images and then the second go round verified them independently and came up with the same chronology as the first one did. And they both used xrf but their methodology was a little bit different from from None to the next but the but the actual sort of ah you know, hypotheses and basis for doing this was pretty much the same. 05:39.24 archpodnet Um, okay. 05:52.22 Alan What they did was examine. The desert varnish the iron manganese-rich coating of the basalt and they would examine quantitatively. How much iron and how much Manganese was in the unpecked Rock. So when you see ah ah but a particular rock that has a petoglyph on it. They would date or get sort of a. 06:17.16 archpodnet Um. 06:28.98 Alan Basis a base date to examine that original then they would also then examine the interstices the little dents in there to get a date for the actual production of. 06:48.46 archpodnet Yeah. 06:48.66 Alan The image itself from when it was when it when it was pecked to when it was currently dated so they would look at what's the quantity of Manganese and the other trace elements in the Actual. Image itself then they would calibrate that and they would come up with a way to date in a relative way the image itself and so both times the dates. The Calibrations and the ages that were inferred were very reasonable. There was nothing crazy about them. In fact, they were rather consistent in either Methodology. The results were is that. 07:38.49 archpodnet Ah. 07:42.29 Alan The oldest petoglyphs were about 10000 years old and the most recent ones were a few hundred years old and the ones that were a few hundred years old were some of the milling slicks the basin metates the ah. 07:47.54 archpodnet Um. 08:00.15 Alan That were superimposed or on rocks that were relatively you know still varnished but these these recent episodes are very light in appearance and the older images become darker. 08:12.14 archpodnet Um. 08:19.40 Alan And until when you find those that you can't even really see unless you have glancing light or a better eye to catch the differences in the dimensions. Those are the oldest images then date between 6 7 8 up until ten thousand years ago and so this all this all was this all was supportive and helpful and sort of led me on this journey of saying wow if all of this makes perfect sense. Maybe we can cross correlate what we're looking at. 08:39.30 archpodnet Wow. 08:55.87 Alan And maybe the the native people the koso people gave us a clue very nice clue and thank you koso people as to the age for these projectile pointed depictions or the ones that are adorning or adjacent to. These animal-human figures. So when people began to look at these and look at them closer closer. They said you know Alan I think these are dart points and I said well why do you say that he says well because they're huge and because they have the form the actual morphology. 09:16.95 archpodnet Um. 09:34.90 Alan And the basal morphology of a very characteristic point form that is a hallmark of the middle Archaic or the newberry period and I agreed I agreed I said yes I see what you're saying. So then we used. Ah. 09:43.97 archpodnet Um. 09:53.37 Alan A technique that David Hurst Thomas pioneered where you can examine the base levels of projectile points and identify metrically what their morphology is in other words, you can measure the angles of the. Base and if it's corner notch. There'd be a distal shoulder angle and a proximal shoulder angle and you can see what the notch opening index is and that is a way to differentiate different styles of points and what we found. Certain projectile points especially in the southwestern quarter of the great basin are very very temporally sensitive. They have only a certain amount of time that they were popular and so one of the things we found was that what we call Elco points elco from elco Nevada. This elco series of projectile points and only the elco corner notched points themselves were the ones that were depicted in the coso cannon as it were they only go between 2000 bc and about a d. 11:09.66 archpodnet Ah. 11:10.38 Alan None there is another style of point called a humboldt or a humboldt basal notched and that's depicted much less frequently. But it overlaps with and is synchronous at the same time as the elcos and those date between None bc and about a d 800 so both of those points are depicted in these pictures and those are the only style points that we see ah depicted and represented in the cosos and when those were dated. Using the x-ray fluorescence method they came out to be on average There was 3 of the different panels dated Twenty Eight hundred twenty seven hundred and twenty six hundred years ago and that's you know, right? there in the in in the ah. 12:00.22 archpodnet Ah. 12:07.10 Alan Association in the right period of time of when these alco points have been archeologically identified dated and also dated through radiocarbon methods. Okay. 12:15.91 archpodnet Right. Okay, yeah, that's really cool because when you were telling that I was actually thinking to myself. Well is it a possibility that later people sort of revered the ancestors or the creators of these I guess more rare because they're they're in a tight timeframe. Um. Projectile points and therefore depicted those on the rocks and the the time frame of construction of the rock art and the actual use of the points would have been out of sync with each other because of that that reverence. But it's awesome in archeology when you can come up with two dating methods that agree with each other because that is like you know. 12:56.77 Alan Yes. 12:59.96 archpodnet That that is where it really hits and you you can't deny that right? you might be like well I'm not so sure about this one and I'm not so sure about this one but they both come up with the same answer that brings both of them into more clarity. Yeah. 13:01.97 Alan No no. 13:10.10 Alan Exactly And what's even more interesting is this this sort of development and and usefulness of examining these projectile points led me to a better understanding of the entire rock art chronology for coso. 13:22.83 archpodnet Um. 13:27.62 Alan And so I was able to sort of examine them examine The super imposition their associations the style and use all of those various data sets to at least posit a working chronology for the entire coso expression. 13:43.32 archpodnet Right? right? Awesome All right? Well with that. Let's take our final break and come back and talk about a little case study and and some more stuff about the book on the other side back in a minute.