ABSTRACT
A. Lahelma argues that that the act of touching and marking rock surfaces was at least as important as depicting recognisable images. A rock art survey project examining the Rio Grande gorge, New Mexico has only documented the Comanche rock art imagery. The chapter examines rock art in two different regions of the globe: Finland and New Mexico. In the case of the Comanche rock art, it was clear that Comanche rock artists intra-acted with the basalt rocks of New Mexico to produce fine imagery whose visual impacts were relatively short-lived; there was an emphasis on the affective power of performance. The chapter explores formal methods for examining gesture and making. For the Comanche, gesture was significant in itself, though more generally gesture lies at the heart of all practices of making. The chapter focuses on the work of Rebecca Farbstein who has examined ceramic, bone and mammoth ivory materials using a chaine operatoire methodology.
