suggesting that some of these paintings could be of considerable age. Photographs taken of the Painted Rocks pictograph site on Flathead Lake in western Montana show the paintings to appear as fresh today as they did in 1903. With such minimal weathering, these (and other similar) paintings could be as much as several centuries old.
A Word Regarding Interpretation
Scientifically accurate interpretations of Columbia Plateau rock art are notably scarce. The written material that presents a realistic idea of the richness of this art tradition (and of the cultures of the artists), along with reasonable explanations of some of the reasons why the art was created, consists of a small handful of professionally published journal articles and graduate student research papers. None of these attempts to deal with more than a small part of the Columbia Plateau province, and very few are oriented toward helping the public understand and appreciate this rock art.
This lack of a comprehensive publication describing and interpreting rock art for the lay public is due primarily to scholars’ reluctance to speculate in print about their subject beyond the limits of statistical confidence intervals, competing hypotheses, and regional style definitions. Thus, the only interpretation readily available to the public often consists of far-fetched “translations” of sites or designs—some of which even go so far as to attribute this art to ancient Chinese explorers, lost Celtic monks, or prehistoric spacemen! The result is a dearth of interesting, scientifically accurate information about rock art written for lay readers.
Elsewhere, other authors and I (Dewdney 1964; Hill and Hill 1974; Joyer 1990; Keyser 1990) have shown that rock art can be interpreted for the general public in a way that both educates and entertains, while still observing the basics of scientific accuracy. Throughout this book I continue this effort. In some cases this involves making leaps of faith (albeit minor ones) that a strict scientific treatment would not. For instance, paintings of horsemen or groups of men with bows and arrows found in the extreme eastern part of the Columbia Plateau (in British Columbia and central Idaho) cannot be positively identified as depicting successful raiding parties returning from the northern Plains. No site was so identified by any of the Kutenai, Nez Perce, or Flathead Indian informants used by early ethnographers in the area. These Indians did, however, recall such raids on Blackfeet, Crow, and Cheyenne villages, and among the Nez Perce there are ledger drawings of such war parties. Informants also indicated that important events were sometimes pictured in rock art.
Therefore, putting these three things together—informant recollections of raiding parties, informant indications that important events were recorded in rock art, and the presence of rock art sites showing armed warriors or groups of horsemen—I feel comfortable speculating that some of these sites do, in fact, show war parties going to or returning from raids on Great Plains tribes. Similarly, the identification of bison hunt drawings, “twin” figures, “spirit beings,” and vision quest pictographs is based on logical deductions drawn from ethnographic accounts, comparison with rock art in other areas (world-wide), and my own experience in nearly twenty years of rock art research. Obviously, in a courtroom much of this would be circumstantial evidence and hearsay, but this is usually the only sort of evidence available to archaeologists. It is exactly this circumstantial evidence that enables us to tell the stories about the people who made the artifacts or painted the pictographs!
This book is, therefore, my interpretation and retelling of some of the myriad fascinating stories with which archaeologists entertain one another around field campfires or in the bars at professional conferences. As such, some of these deductions are not “statistically significant,” and some have alternate explanations in the form of “competing hypotheses.” They are, however, good stories, based on the best available scientific information and thousands of hours of analysis, study, and thought. I hope they make you think about the subject, but more than that, I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
† Long Narrows was the term for part of The Dalles of the Columbia River. A series of basalt gorges formed steep-sided canyons through which the Columbia cascaded; these are now obliterated by the Dalles Dam.
Map 2. The geographical boundary of the Columbia Plateau, which consists of the drainages of the Fraser and Columbia rivers and the Hells Canyon portion of the Snake River.
The Columbia Plateau and Its Artists
THE COLUMBIA PLATEAU EN-compasses the watershed of the Columbia River and its major tributaries (excluding the upper Snake River in southern Idaho) and the drainage of the Fraser River in south-central British Columbia (map 2). The region is bounded on the west by the Cascade Range, on the north by the divide between the Mackenzie and Fraser rivers, on the south by the northern Great Basin, and on the east by the Rocky Mountains. The plateau has a mild, dry continental climate with hot summers and cold winters. Temperature extremes range from –30 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Winters often have heavy snows, especially in the mountains; rain falls primarily in the spring and fall with occasional summer thunder-showers.
The northern Columbia Plateau is heavily forested with dense stands of fir and pine. Rushing streams and major rivers flow through narrow valleys that trend north to south. Numerous long, narrow, deep lakes (e.g., Flathead, Chelan, Priest, Kootenay, and Arrow) occupy glacially scoured portions of these valleys in western Montana, British Columbia, northern Idaho, and northern Washington. Mountain ranges throughout the area are often steep and severely sculpted by glacial erosion.
The central and southern portions of the region are an ancient basalt plateau formed by successive lava flows extruded from Miocene volcanos between 10 and 30 million years ago. In some places the basalts are more than ten thousand feet thick. Along the Columbia and Snake rivers successive layers form basalt rimrocks that rise more than one thousand feet above the deeply cut rivers, forming Hells Canyon of the Snake River and the Columbia Gorge. Other major rivers in this part of the plateau, the Deschutes and John Day, also flow through deep, basalt-rimmed gorges. This part of the Columbia Plateau, more arid than the northern section, has typical vegetation of mixed short-grass and sagebrush prairie with scattered forests on uplands like the Wallowa mountains.
In the approximate center of the Columbia Plateau lie the channeled scablands ranging around Dry Falls near Coulee City. These prehistoric water courses, Hells Canyon on the Snake River, and the Columbia Gorge are all relict landscapes formed by immense floods from glacial lakes Missoula and Bonneville, which emptied during the melting and retreat of the Pleistocene glaciers twelve thousand to twenty thousand years ago (U.S. Geological Survey 1973).
Throughout the entire region, the most prominent topographic features are the steep sheer cliffs—basalt in the central plateau and granite, argillite, or metamorphic rocks in the surrounding mountains and foothills. On these cliffs, and in shallow rock shelters along lakeshores, streams, and ridge tops, are found more than 750 sites of the Columbia Plateau rock art tradition.
The Prehistoric Record Clovis Culture
Archaeological evidence indicates that humans first came to the Columbia Plateau approximately twelve thousand years ago (10,000 B.C.). (See fig. 2.) These earliest immigrants, coming across the Bering land bridge from Asia and then moving south along the flanks of the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific coast, encountered a virgin land filled with herds of mammoth, mastodon, giant bison, ground sloths, and camels. They wandered from place to place, stopping to kill and butcher animals and camp in sheltered locations. Evidence of these early hunters—the characteristic Clovis fluted and lanceolate projectile points—has been found at a few sites scattered throughout the region: on the Snake River plain in Idaho, at the Dietz site
