Rock Art Images
Part of the culture of Eastern Woodland Native Americans is placing art images on rock features. These people were recreating in art form what they were seeing and living with daily. Most of the art forms they created were of animals. Human images or abstract images, such as a fire torch or a weapon like a bow and arrow, were left on rocks and boulders. Sometimes, we can even obtain a minimum date of a site based on the images left behind. For example, if a site has rock art images of wooly mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, or short-faced bears, we know these animals went extinct during the Younger Dryas event around 11,800 years ago. This gives us a “minimum date” for this site, although it could be much older.
The three types of rock art images we find are petroglyphs, outline glyphs, and pictographs.
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