By David Robinson

Within the hidden inland and interior regions of South-Central California, millions of years of wind scouring and water erosion have sculpted distinctive yellow-and-tan sandstone outcrops into bizarre and beguiling forms worthy of a Daliesque timescape. The endless forces of weather and climate have created a menagerie of rocky pinnacles, honeycombed sandstone cavities, and sinuous rockshelters.  In desert scrub and patchy oak woodlands, misshapen cave mouths appear to grin awkwardly in shifting shadow and light as the sun wheels overhead, season after season.

Rock formation, Rattlesnake Shelter, Sierra Madre

Compelling formations

These places have more than a touch of the legendary about them; mythologised as animals turned to stone, the Native Chumash and neighbouring indigenous Californians were attracted to these compelling formations, where they painted a form of rock-art exceptional by anyone’s standard—fanciful figures depicting insects, reptiles, birds, bears, humans, or strange combinations, often with upturned appendages or embellished with fine lines and delicate dots.  Other images, painted in vibrant reds, look like mandalas or sun disks with radiating spokes.  There are even abstract compositions in suites of exotic colours—images beguiling as any produced by the most cunning and skilful of surrealists.

Scholars have turned to the pages of relatively recent 20th century anthropological accounts to formulate theories regarding the shamanic inspiration of these paintings. These controversial theories have advanced rock-art studies and brought rock-art to the wider attention of the archaeological community.  Even so, we still have meagre understandings of where the art was placed and how it was viewed, how old it is, what activities took place around it, and what variety of roles it may have played in the past. The rock paintings of the Californian interior remains one of the least understood of all archaeological phenomena found in the Americas.

Map showing project study area

The surreal pictographs of the Californian Chumash have been recognised since the 1960s as among the most elaborate and exquisite examples of rock-art found anywhere on the continent. Yet, unlike some other regions (where rock-art sites have been the focus of excavation), scant attention has been paid to investigating these paintings in terms of the archaeological features and materials surrounding them. Because of this, we have little comprehension of the context within which these often vibrant and colourful paintings were made, either throughout over 10,000 years of indigenous prehistory nor even within historical times.

Surprisingly rich archaeological remains

Painted on rock surfaces above the soils and sediments that regularly contain quite surprisingly rich archaeological remains, the art hovers as if in a timeless ‘ethnographic’ present, separated from the material left behind by the very people who lived and worked around the art, and from those who must have made it. If we know little about the making of the art itself, we know even less about the archaeology lying quietly below.  This material may well hold vital clues to understanding both the community and the art found in their midst.  Quite simply, while the pages of recent written accounts have been turned with keen scholarly attention, few have plumbed the depths of those deposits to understand the deeper human history of the spaces where the art once made has since endured. Until very recently, that is.

Pinwheel Cave

A few years ago, a small team of archaeologists from as far afield as England and from nearby in California excavated a little rock-art site called Pinwheel Cave, located on a magical place called the Wind Wolves Preserve found in the very heart of South-Central California.  This pilot project also included students from both Europe and America, and was exciting in bringing together people from such diverse backgrounds and ways of doing archaeology.

Finds from Pinwheel Cave

At Pinwheel Cave, few artefacts were evident on the surface beneath the art, and it appeared to be a classic example of a hidden shamanic site.  However, it was surprising what the students found during excavation and in the screens while sieving; beautifully crafted arrowheads and the small flakes from their retouching, burnt animal bone and charcoal from cooking and eating, and even tiny shell and colourful glass beads showing a range of material culture from Late Prehistory and during colonial times.  Indeed, nearby bedrock mortars showed that acorns, the staple food of the Californian Indian, were processed in some quantity from the oak woodlands surrounding.  The archaeology of Pinwheel Cave showed it was anything but a private site.  It became clear that it was as important a place in the local environment as it was a place for painting.  Perhaps the two — rock-art and environment—were related?

Los Padres pictograph with bedrock mortars. © Rick Bury 2010

Teasing out the relationships between art and its environment

The Chumash were a diverse population of sophisticated hunter/gatherers who inhabited many different areas from the Pacific waters of the Santa Barbara Channel, inland through the rugged coastal ranges of the backcountry, and even deeper into interior California to the margins of the great San Joaquin Valley. It is here, at the very margins of their territory, where some of the most spectacular examples of Far Western rock-art can be found and where our recent research is attempting to tease out the relationships between art and its environment through systematic archaeological work. This is no easy task. Where once extensive wetlands and lake systems teaming with waterfowl existed, dry land with irrigated orange groves and bobbing oil derricks now stand.  Old wave cut terraces still can be found demarcating the shores of now-desiccated lakes due to more than a century of modern agricultural drainage.   All around these now dry lake edges once existed large villages of the people known as the Yokuts in one of the most densely-occupied indigenous regions in California; the Interior Chumash lived just to the south in the San Emigdio foothills rising above and overlooking the lakes.  This region, as one of the most heavily-impacted ecosystems in the world, is where the Wind Wolves Preserve was created in the 1990s in efforts to preserve and restore natural habitats in the onslaught of development and modern population growth.

Largest private land holding in the American West

As the largest private land holding in the American West, the Wind Wolves Preserve encompasses around 100,000 acres of mountains and meadows, canyons and open lands.  They are dedicated to educating the public about the environment and the real benefits of protecting threatened animal and plant communities to preserve wildlife diversity.  Equally, they are concerned that we learn about the past human communities who lived for such a long time within those habitats in close, symbiotic relationships. As a result, a partnership has emerged between our concern of the archaeological environment of the past and the preserve’s concern for the ongoing living environment.  At the core of this partnership is a mutual and deep commitment to education.

Establishing a field school

For this reason, we have established an archaeological field school looking at the long-term human relationship with the environment and how indigenous people made the landscape their own; a process called ‘enculturation’. This project allows students the opportunity to be active participants in researching the past environment of this unique landscape in the heart of California.

the rock invariably used was that near to reliable water supplies, at rich riparian zones, or within oak woodland where abundant acorns can be gathered

Rock-art is one way that the Chumash enculturated their surroundings, particularly, rock surfaces. However, our research has shown that not just any rock surface was chosen; the rock invariably used was that near to reliable water supplies, at rich riparian zones, or within oak woodland where abundant acorns can be gathered.  To reach these places requires a trek into the rugged terrain. Along the way, we often see amazing wildlife such as deer, elk, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, as well as all kinds of birds including redtail hawks, falcons, and golden eagles—even the elusive condor visited us on one occasion.

Students learn about the preserve from talks by its staff and rangers and tours to different areas of the landscape.  However, the primary business of this project is to come to grips with the changing environment of the past as found at the very intriguing landforms where the art is found.

Our excavations include auguring transects across the adjacent environs to examine landform and sediment changes. In the summer of 2008, students auguring at the site of Three Springs found evidence that the oak woodland would have been more extensive in the past; as a site currently with sparse oaks, this finding may explain why so many bedrock mortars are found there.

Laser scanning at Pinwheel Cave

Other excavations, such as in 2009 at Los Lobos, have shown that the hydrology of landscape in the past was at times much wetter than currently visible.  These findings go much further towards rethinking the placement of art as a way of marking the very most important places for past populations in terms of water and food resources.  More and more we see evidence that rock-art was positioned at places concerned with the everyday tasks of the local community rather than the private mindscape of the shaman. Still, this does not mean that the art was simply about the stomach or in the realm of the mundane.  In one of the shelters containing rock-art, our field school found a carefully placed stone with iridescent facets embedded throughout its natural matrix. It was not modified, but rather a natural object found locally but probably considered special because of its reflective qualities. These kinds of findings are showing that even though rock-art sites were places where people undertook day-to-day activities, the space of the shelters themselves were sometimes considered quite special. For this reason, we have employed a variety of digital techniques to record them in the highest detail possible, including laser scanning and digital photogrammetry. In combination with our digital mapping, we are able to create computer models of the rock-art site, the landscape, and the environment. Students are trained in all these aspects and contribute to the final rendering that allows us to more fully reconstruct the archaeological past.

DAVID ROBINSON is a lecturer in archaeology at University of Central Lancashire. He graduated from University of California Santa Barbara where he first became interested in Chumash rock-art while working on the Kamupau Project. He completed a PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK) studying the rock-art of the Wind Wolves Preserve in 2006 and has researched rock-art, graffiti, and landscape in England, Spain, India and California.  He works on both prehistoric and historical archaeology, including the Stonehenge Riverside Project, the Tyntesfield World War II Project, and, of course, the Enculturating Environments Project.

More information:
Antiquity article: Enculturating environments: rock art and the archaeology of interior south-central California