Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau. James D. Keyser

      Preface

      I SAW MY FIRST INDIAN ROCK painting in western Montana when I was nine years old. My father had heard of the site several years before, and finally agreed to take an eager son who had just become fascinated with American Indians and their history. I still remember the experience: I marveled at the red painted deer that covered the rock wall and wondered what the nearby tally marks meant. To look at these pictures and to realize that they were painted before European Americans came to Montana was heady stuff for a boy who had just read about the Indian wars, Custer, Fort Fetterman, and the Wagon Box Fight.

      During the next ten years, I visited several more sites in western and central Montana, usually on family outings. Then I entered college, and began studying archaeology, and found the library to be a treasure house of books and articles about rock art across the United States and around the world. I read everything I could find on the subject and scoured professional journals for the few articles concerning the rock art of my home state. In 1974, when I got the chance to do archaeological field work, I began my first rock art research project: recording the pictographs of western Montana, including the site that had sparked my interest fifteen years before. Imagine my joy upon learning that the site was even more impressive than I had remembered, and in finding two other sites nearby. That summer, a colleague and I visited most of western Montana’s thirty sites.

      As I did the research for a professional journal article about these paintings, I read or reread dozens of the available publications on rock art. There were two basic sorts of publications. Most common were simple descriptive works with page after page illustrating various paintings and carvings, but without answers as to why or when the art was made. A few professional publications interpreted rock art, but for most people these explanations were obscured by clouds of jargon, statistical comparisons, and references to scholarly works not readily available outside of university research libraries. A few notable books, especially those by Campbell Grant (1967) or Selwyn Dewdney and Kenneth Kidd (1967), were different in providing plenty of good illustrations combined with readable, informative text. But these books had little or nothing about Columbia Plateau rock art, and Grant’s national overview, Rock Art of the American Indian, didn’t report even one of the sites I had just finished recording! In passing, I thought how sad it was that no book existed about these paintings—or about any of the many others that I had learned of in neighboring states and Canadian provinces—that not only pictured the art but also went much further to tell who made them, why, and when.

      I finished the article on western Montana pictographs and moved on to other subjects in archaeology, including rock art in other areas. In the intervening fifteen years I have written many of those articles filled with jargon, charts, and statistics, attempting to describe this art to other professional colleagues and to discern the “who, why, when, and what” that would help explain it. I have had fun doing this, and I have traveled throughout the northern Great Plains, the Columbia Plateau, and even to Europe to conduct my research. I have been fortunate in having had the opportunity to do much of this research in the course of jobs with universities and government agencies in both the United States and Canada.

      Throughout my career, however, I have never forgotten my initial interest in rock art and my disappointment that so few publications had both good illustrations and answers to my many questions. Likewise, I have been conscious that much of my research has been funded by public support to preserve and study these prehistoric relics. In the past few years I have spoken to numerous public groups—from grade-school classes to historical societies—in an attempt to make more information about rock art available to the lay public, and thus to give something back to the people who ultimately support my research. This book is one more way that I can offer something about this subject to those who are interested. I hope it reaches everyone who has ever thought, “Why did they do these drawings? What do they mean?” Maybe some young person will read the book and find in its pages the same fascination that I found in that Montana pictograph thirty years ago.

      Acknowledgments

      Many people assisted in various ways with this book. Rick McClure, Carl Davis, Dan Leen, and Susan Carter all showed me sites and provided hard-to-find research source materials. McClure, Leen, Keo Boreson, and Greg Bettis gave photographs and drawings of many Columbia Plateau rock art sites. George Knight helped record and analyze western Montana pictographs during my first rock art research project. Dick Buscher, Greg Warren, and Don Oliver each gave support and counsel for my writing and illustrating the book. Paula Sindberg provided a place to live, a word processor, and sufficient moral support for me to take the time to write this book. To each of these people I give my heartfelt thanks; they all share in the success of this work.

      To my parents, Dr. and Mrs. Raymond C. Keyser, I dedicate the book. Early on they recognized and fostered my interest in Indians and archaeology. Their support, and especially a trip to show a nine-year-old boy the Perma pictographs, is as much responsible for this book as anything else.

      Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau

      Map 1. The Columbia Plateau region, showing locations of major rock art study projects. Larger numbers indicate regional studies. 1, Bell 1979; 2, Baravalle 1981; 3, Keyser and Knight 1976; 4, Lundy 1979; 5, Boreson 1985; 6, Boreson 1984; 7, Leen 1988; 8, Corner 1968; 9, Nesbitt 1968; 10, Richards 1981; 11, Leen 1984; 12, Cain 1950; 13, McClure 1984; 14, McClure 1978; 15, Loring and Loring 1982.

      Introduction

      SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE Pacific Northwest are hundreds of prehistoric rock paintings and carvings made by the Indians of this region prior to European American settlement of the area. These pictures, carved into basalts along the Columbia River and its tributaries, or painted on

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