Online Rock Art Lectures

January 8: 2022: Bell Rocks, Flower World Symbolism, Origin Stories, Human Transformation: Patterns from Petroglyph Recordings at 62 Ancestral O’odham Sites – Janine Hernbrode    Register
Data has been collected of motif details, drawings and photographs for more than 18,000 petroglyphs and pictographs at 62 imagery sites. Janine has identified threads of continuity between Native American belief systems and the rock art motifs by using the scientific method to study the patterns identified in the images, working with ethnographic accounts and linguistic analyses by others, and consulting with indigenous people,. This work demonstrates that ethnographic and linguistic information can suggest links to sacred landscapes and some motifs found in rock art. Her recent work on bell rocks has illuminated links between the sound of bells at petroglyph and pictograph sites, the site’s sacred landscape, and ethnographic records for the O’odham.

Janine Hernbrode, a retired science administrator and curriculum writer, has spent 16 years recording rock art within 30 miles of Tucson, primarily among the sacred sites of the Ancestral O’odham people.

Wary of becoming relentless quantifiers through rock art recording, she and her research partner, Peter Boyle, worked to analyze data from the recordings of Tumamoc Hill, the Sutherland Wash Rock Art District, Cocoraque Butte, and Cocoraque Ranch. Hernbrode has added data for analysis from the last 4 years spent recording 31 smaller sites in Saguaro National Park. Recently she has worked on a newly-discovered pictograph site in Coronado National Forest before moving to her present sites within the Pima County Park System.

Hernbrode is the leader of the “Rock Band,” a group of volunteer rock art recorders, archaeologists, and photographers who document sites and gather the data.