Dialogues with the old
Honoring archaeologist Polly Dix Schaafsma
Honoring archaeologist Polly Dix Schaafsma
Polly Dix Schaafsma, an archaeologist who has long specialized in Indian rock art, is featured in the current issue of the New Mexico Historical Review, and this month she is receiving two honorary doctorate degrees in recognition of her work — yet this is a domain that has not been a priority for a good number of her peers. In a recent interview at her Santa Fe home, Schaafsma said many archaeologists “sort of shrugged their shoulders about rock art. They didn’t like it because it wasn’t dated, because there’s no stratigraphy in an excavation.” Even today, most of them “often seem to harbor the notion that image-making is a whimsical thing and brush it off,” she says in Review. “Archaeologists won’t extend their interest to all these little wiggly figures of flute players and animals.”
Schaafsma is one of the world’s foremost authorities on aboriginal rock art, according to Duane Anderson (former vice president of the School for Advanced Research and former longtime director of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture) in his nomination for her to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of New Mexico. “She has changed the long-held view that rock art is idiosyncratic and difficult, if not impossible, to date and interpret.” In a letter of support, Santa Clara Pueblo elder Tessie Naranjo wrote about Schaafsma’s “sincere dedication to ethical collaborative documentation and interpretation of the many symbols, etchings, and drawings on rocks and in murals left by my (and other) Pueblo’s ancestors.” She added, “Not all Pueblo scholars agree with her interpretaton of the images she sees and writes about. If or when I have questioned her regarding an interpretation I have been tempted to say to her, ‘I never thought of it that way.’ ”
Anderson recently told Pasatiempo that he submitted a similar request for recognition to the University of Colorado. Both have been confirmed: Schaafsma was notified on Feb. 26 that she would be presented with an honorary doctorate in science at the May 7th University of Colorado commencement in Boulder, and University of New Mexico president Robert Frank wrote to the Santa Fe resident that an honorary doctorate “recognizing her “extraordinary contributions and accomplishments” would be given on May 14.
Schaafsma grew up in Vermont. “I was an art history major in college, but I got really tired of New England,” she said. “I knew there was a bigger world out there. In my sophomore year, I applied for jobs in every national park in the West, and I got a job at Mesa Verde.” There she spent two summers waiting tables for tourists, and she “quickly found out that Indians and cliff dwellings were a lot more interesting than cowboys and horses,” according to the article in New Mexico Historical Review. She would hike out to Petroglyph Point on Mesa Verde, but she remembered thinking, “What could you learn from that jumble of lines?”
When she was in graduate school at Colorado pursuing a degree in anthropology, Curtis Schaafsma — her husband, who is an emeritus curator of anthropology at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture and former director of the Laboratory of Anthropology — got a job on the archaeological digs prior to construction of the Navajo Reservoir Project dam. They needed somebody to do the rock art study, and Polly immersed herself in that realm. Not long after that, she and photographer Karl Kernberger secured a state grant to do a survey of the rock art of New Mexico. “We spent four months in the field all over the state, trying to get a grasp of what was out there. We just traveled around and talked to local people; one of them was [artist] Peter Hurd in Lincoln County.”
“I am not a collector — you know, wanting to get to every site that’s been heard of in the Southwest — but the other side is that the more you see, the more you know, because it all adds up, and different information reinforces other information. If you can understand art styles in Western art, you can do the same thing with rock art, because there are cultural norms determining how you make a figure. There are so many ways to depict a human figure. The thing about New Mexico is that because people put imagery on pottery and kiva murals, you have a cross-media reference for understanding dates, and
you can make comparisons and assign things to different cultural groups.”
She documented her findings in Rock Art in New Mexico (1972). Her other books include Indian Rock Art of the Southwest (1980, now in its 10th printing), and Images and Power: Ethics and Rock Art (2012). The range of topics in the various chapters includes Pueblo kiva murals, shamanism, sacred bundles, feathered stars, the horned serpent, warfare versus ritual violence, and the presence of the Mesoamerican Morning Star-Rain-Maize Complex in the Southwest.
In her surveys, Schaafsma sometimes found that a Native artist had created an image on a rock face that bore a much older image made by another. “For example, in the Four Corners, Navajo rock art is superimposed over earlier Pueblo rock art.” Is the artist having some sort of dialogue with the previous mark-maker? “Well, if you’re walking in the boonies and you see rock art, it defines the place. It changes it, because somebody was there and made an image. It might be regarded as sacred or it might evoke a myth, even though it’s from somebody else’s rock art. You never know. But it marks a special place, and you might put your images there because of that, or you might do it because you wanted to dominate whoever was there before, or erase their evidence from the past.”
“You begin to discern the patterns of rock art over the landscape,” she says in the New Mexico Historical
Review article, “and then you can ask, Why were people making art and how does the art help in understanding their world views, cultural values and concerns?” This issue of the Review features six articles devoted to Schaafsma’s work — and she collaborated with Navajo anthropologist Will Tsosie on the chapter “Xeroxed on Stone: Times of Origin and the Navajo Holy People in Canyon Landscapes.”
There is a great variety of rock art in New Mexico, covering quite a long span of time, but most of what you see at Petroglyph National Monument, for example, is from what archaeologists call the Pueblo IV Period, from AD 1300 to 1600. “In Pueblo rock art, there was a major change between the end of the 13th century and into the 14th century, because there was drought and fighting and people moved off the Colorado Plateau,” Schaafsma said. “It was a period of cultural crisis. It’s at that point when we begin to see the impact, in the Río Grande Valley, of a new type of religious cosmology from the south, and it was with great enthusiasm that they made a lot of imagery connected with that. A lot of the thinking that was adopted by Pueblo people, for which we have evidence in the rock art from that time, is also conceptually part of the larger Mesoamerican world of farmers.”
Has she witnessed a substantial Mexican influence at Chaco Canyon? “That’s a big argument, but no. There were macaws, a few copper bells, and chocolate, but if you trust imagery to reflect what people are thinking, those elements did not change Chacoan religion. They did not make Chaco distinct from their neighbors on the plateau.”
While petroglyphs can be found in all sorts of landscapes — where there are rocks that can be engraved or picked — pictographs that have survived
If you’re walking in the boonies and you see rock art, it defines the place. It changes it, because somebody was there and made an image. It might be regarded as sacred or it might evoke a myth, even though it’s from somebody else’s rock art. You never know. — Polly Dix Schaafsma
for centuries are limited to caves and the subterranean ceremonial chambers known as kivas. “In the Pueblo IV period, there was an explosion of kiva art. There’s a problem in preservation because they were easily destroyed, but we have Kawaika-a and Awatovi at Hopi [reservation] and then Pottery Mound south of Albuquerque and Kuaua at Coronado State Monument. Kiva murals represent ceremonial scenes. On a kiva wall, you have a framed field on which you can do a complex scene that has continuity. You don’t find that as often in a cave.”
Schaafsma said layered images are sometimes found in kiva murals. “A kiva painting could be mud plastered over and a new painting made, then again, so that over the history of the kiva there’s an accumulation of imagery. One of the things that interests me is perceptions of landscape and how landscape is used as part of people’s cosmology. The landscape is a very different place than the kiva. One is in the village and the other is outside, and they would have had different audiences.”
She did not go into detail about anthropomorphic Pueblo imagery in rock art in this area, but she did say that examples of early common figures in Pueblo rock art not too distant from Santa Fe and Albuquerque include mountain sheep and powerful animals such as mountain lions and bears. Birds are important symbols in the Río Grande Valley. “One thing I tried to investigate is the sandal track. It’s a type of sandal that was made from 1100 and it peaked right at 1200: a jog-toed sandal. They show up across the Colorado Plateau.” The sandal shape is sometimes shown as tracks, but usually it’s just the sandal icon by itself. “I never could come up with any sound conclusions about the meaning. It could represent a culture hero.”
Shields are also fairly common. “They start showing up in the Pueblo iconography in the Four Corners, just before the place was vacated. You have to understand that not only is the item itself full of power, but an image of it can be as well. I think these shield paintings associated with cliff dwellings in the Four Corners area were put there as defensive magic, like the hex symbols on barns in Pennsylvania.” She recalled seeing the Baseball Man House ruins on a San Juan River trip up Chinle Wash in Colorado. “It’s a Pueblo III [1100-1300] site, and there’s one big shield painting that was made on top of a Basketmaker figure, so I think they incorporated the power of the Basketmaker figure into the shield.”
Also common are figures of turtles, dragonflies, snakes, and clouds, because of the profound importance of water to the people living long ago in arid New Mexico. “A lot of the figures in rock art have cloud depictions on their torsos. There is a figure in southern New Mexico that I think is a Southwestern image of the Mexican rain god Tlaloc. Cotton is important, too. Cotton looks like clouds, and when you see patterns of woven cotton in rock art, they may relate to rainmaking.”
Schaafsma was careful about providing details about rock art locations, because of the danger of vandalism, and about the meanings of the iconography out of respect to Pueblo people. But she sees two sides on the latter issue. “My thing is this, when you go to a foreign country to live, they say you should learn about the people. Well, you come to the Southwest, and you find out that these people have been living here for 10,000 years, and I want to learn about them. Also, if you keep Westerners isolated in their own little box, they’re never going to understand why rock art is important and why they shouldn’t destroy it.”
She has changed the long-held view that rock art is idiosyncratic and difficult, if not impossible, to date and interpret. — Duane Andersen, former SAR vice president