North American Archaeologist

One of the more spectacular expressions of prehistoric rock art in all of North America is the petroglyph concentration in the Coso Range of eastern California. These glyphs have played a prominent role in attempts to understand forager religious iconography. Four decades ago, Heizer and Baumhoff (1962) concluded that Great Basin petroglyphs were associated with hunting large game and were intended to supernaturally increase success in the hunt. Similarly, in their seminal work Grant et al. (1968) concluded that the mountain sheep drawings of the Coso region bolstered the “hunting magic” hypothesis. However, this hypothesis has become increasingly marginalized by a prevailing view that considers most rock art as an expression of individual shamanistic endeavor (cf. Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1988; Whitley, 1994; Whitley and Loendorf, 1994). This article explores comparative ethnologic and archaeological evidence supporting the hunting magic hypothesis. I place this explanatory framework in a larger context based on a contemporary understanding of comparative religion and the complexity of forager symbolism. The article argues that the preponderance of Coso images are conventionalized iconography associated with a sheep cult ceremonial complex. This is inconsistent with models interpreting the Coso drawings as metaphoric images correlated with individual shamanic vision quests.

This report documents a Clovis-like fluted point found in shallow waters of Great Egg Harbor Bay, a backbarrier lagoon along the Jersey shore. The artifact has a complicated life history and is significant by enriching the vastly incomplete Paleoindian data base from New Jersey's Outer Coastal Plain. Despite the extraordinary circumstances of its discovery, this fluted point calls new attention to the potential of nearshore and estuarine settings in our search for traces of the First Americans in eastern North America.

While a student at the University of Wisconsin, Frederick Jackson Turner, excavated a burial mound in Wisconsin in 1886. Best known later for his “frontier thesis,” Turner suggested the skeletal remains might be those of a mound builder, a vanished race that preceded the American Indians. Following the excavation, Turner, a pioneer in interdisciplinary historical research, immersed himself in the limited Midwest archaeological literature of the day and probably came to accept the Native Americans as the makers of the mounds. While his dig remained a one-time event, Turner's interest in archaeology continued in the years to follow.