This book takes a novel approach to the study of rock art in the American Southwest by focusing on rock art in the contemporary cultural landscape—specifically its relationships with media representations and commercial representations of Native American peoples and cultures. Traditional rock art students look at the images and meaning of the art in its prehistoric context and attempt to ferret out its meaning to ancient people and culture. This book emphasizes contemporary reproductions, appropriations, interpretations, management, and the appeal of rock art for modern Americans.
As rock art has attracted the attention of more and more serious scholars, it has also attracted the attention of New Age cultists, commercial artists, avocationalists, and crazies all seeking to interpret it to meet their own perspectives and goals.
The author Richard Rogers is a professor of communication studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He has been exploring the Southwest for many years and, for the last twenty years, critically examining rock art both prehistoric and contemporary. He draws on these observations to develop ideas of how modern Americans view Native cultures through rock art.
Rogers argues that the “flute player” often called Kokopelli is symbolic of the contrast between ancient rock art and modern cultural appropriation. The figure of a hunchbacked man who seems to be playing a flute while dancing is found on rock art panels throughout the Southwest. To traditionalists he is a symbol of masculinity and sexual dominance. But in the modern Southwest Kokopelli is ubiquitous, found everywhere including on high-priced subdivisions, cafés, tableware, lawn decoration, and every imaginable curio. This is seen as a trivialization of a very serious form of communication by Native Americans for Native Americans.
Rogers challenges archaeologists, anthropologists, and other serious students of rock art as well as Native Americans to look beyond contemporary culture to experience these ancient drawings in the context in which they were created.
