ABSTRACT
Human societies endow the physical landscape with significant meaning, both historical and spiritual, and, as noted earlier, rock art is land literally marked with cultural texts. As the Crow examples show, rock art was created in specific places based on cultural concepts and uses of landscape; thus, the knowledge about that art and how it is to be interpreted relies on shared memories of historic Crow cultural uses of land. Although memories of historical representational art are brought to bear in “reading” petroglyphs and pictographs, the possible dual response to the art—whether human (biographic/historic or visionary) or ghost produced—derives from its situatedness on the land (Figure 7.1).
