UC Santa Cruz

Developments in archaeological practice facilitate the following innovative approaches to investigating ethnographically informed, multisensory phenomenologies of visual culture and landscape in the northern Mojave Desert. Synonymous with the hotly debated and widely publicized southwestern Great Basin, this region hosts a remarkably prolific rock art tradition that has featured prominently in discourses of archaeological methods, theories, and culture histories. While much of the debate derives data from the volcanic Coso Range, evidence available from neighbouring mountain and valley systems often goes ignored. With project areas at both the foot of the Coso Range and in the vicinity of Death Valley, my research incorporates into this conversation new data and overlooked literature to provide new perspectives on important transitional areas between Precontact cultural zones.

My experimental and interdisciplinary approach demonstrates principles which promise to democratize archaeological practice while simultaneously harnessing the analytical potential of emerging methods now available in the digital age. These new, non-invasive methods exemplify culturally sensitive approaches to digital heritage management, as the archaeology discipline continues to cope with rising to meet its legal and ethical obligations established in recent decades. Compelling evidence from integrating quantifiable visual, acoustical, and spatial data with multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks, and indigenous oral traditions provides remarkable new insights into population histories, religious practices, and Native American cosmologies. These insights establish grounds on which to improve methods and theoretical applications in archaeological approaches to landscape, visual culture, acoustics, and astronomy, and mark an important step towards multivocality. In expanding the knowledge of Numic iconography and verbal symbolism, and extending the boundaries of the petroglyphs discourse to important interregional intermediaries, this project is uniquely situated to address dynamic processes in linguistic and ideological systems among a immense, multicultural interaction sphere spanning from coastal California through the American Southwest, and into Mesoamerica.