This volume documents Native American rock art in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and eastern Quebec in Canada, and the six New England states plus New York, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and the Lower Potomac Valley of Maryland and Virginia. The authors examine sixty-four locales with petroglyphs (pecked or incised) and pictographs (painted) representing a wide variety of symbols created over a period of several thousand years. While rock art is more visible in the American Southwest, it can be found throughout the United States and Canada. In the Northeast it is abundant, but more difficult to find.
The author Edward Lenik is a contract archaeologist who is a noted expert on the rock art of this region, and co-author Nancy Gibbs is an artist and long-time collaborator of Lenik’s. The sites are organized first by zone—coastal, rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, and upland sites; and then by states and provinces. The art consists of abstract and geometric designs like circles, zig-zag lines, and cross-hatched patterns. Other sites feature humans, handprints, footprints, mammals, serpents, and mythical beings. Clearly they are sacred to Native Americans, and the authors provide indigenous interpretations where possible.
This work is enhanced by a discussion on how to identify and authenticate indigenous rock art, and a glossary of rock art terms. Rock Art in an Indigenous Landscape is a valuable addition to the growing scholarship of rock art research.
Hunters of the Mid-Holocene Forest: Old Cordilleran Culture Sites at Granite Falls, Washington
By James C. Chatters, Jason B. Cooper, and Phillippe D. LeTourneau
(University of Utah Press, 2021; 240 pgs., illus., $55 paper; www.uofupress.com)
The Old Cordilleran Tradition of the Pacific Northwest consists of a distinctive stone tool assemblage of projectile points, knives, and other items. It is found from central British Columbia to northern California and believed to derive from a similar tradition in Siberia. In much of western Washington it is known as the Olcott Complex. It is one of the mysteries of Northwest archaeology, as little is known of the people who produced these stone tools. Olcott sites are fairly common in the area, but they have little or no datable materials due to the highly acidic nature of the local soils.
In 2008, a highway project gave archaeologists the opportunity to study in depth two of the Olcott sites, and this volume reports on the results of this research. The scholars were able to gain information that allowed them to refine the dates for the Olcott complex, the major goal of the project. Obsidian hydration and cross-dating of point styles provided an approximate age range. Luminescence produced more precise dates—7,700 to 9,600 years ago—within that range. New information was also discovered about Olcott food sources and procurement methods.
This volume provides important new information about a well-known but little understood regional culture that will be the basis for even more research in the years to come.
—Mark Michel
