Down Canyons and Up Cliffs, Pursuing Southwest’s Ancient Art

Submitted by coldrum on Thursday, 25 September 2008 Page Views: 11334

In his mid-60s, Ekkehart Malotki, a retired linguistics professor, willingly dangled from a rope tied to a car that was backed to the edge of a cliff. A half-dozen times, he descended with his rope, photographed the cliff face and climbed back up. He was documenting a rock art panel a quarter-mile long in northern Arizona. These adventures are commonplace for Dr. Malotki, a German-born American who is now 69.

Dr. Malotki fell in love with America’s desert Southwest as a 20-something graduate student of languages at the University of California, San Diego. There, he debunked the longstanding notion that the Hopi tribe of northern Arizona did not talk about time. He believes time is a fundamental, universal concept that is likely to appear in the words of any human culture, and with respect to the Hopi, he was right. As a linguist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Dr. Malotki spent decades chronicling the nuanced Hopi tongue.
Dr. Malotki began roaming the desert in pursuit of Kokopelli, the southwestern deity depicted as a man playing a flute, which had been incorrectly linked with a Hopi kachina, or spirit. He found much evidence to dispel the association. And everywhere he went, he found art: pot shards, carved petroglyphs and painted pictographs.
“This is my bliss, going out in search of rock art.”
Dr. Malotki’s latest focus is on designs called phosphenes, which are as fundamental to art as time is to language. He said the same 15 abstract geometric constants appear globally in art created as early as 300,000 years ago. They are grids, zigzags and patterns of dots. They are the first objects drawn by children; we doodle them when we talk on the phone.
Many archaeologists have neglected these ancient symbols in recent decades, Dr. Malotki said, because of a view that “they didn’t allow insight into the minds of the creators.” He disagrees.
And that is a large part of Dr. Malotki’s motivation. He laments that people use rock art for target practice or sell it on eBay. “The idea is to tantalize the reader with aesthetic masterpieces representing the spectrum of Arizona’s paleoart through the ages,” he said. “By showcasing the imagery in a compelling way, I hope to also influence people to respect it.”

For more, see the New York Times article.

Note: Study of the commonalty of rock art symbols.

Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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