Thinking about rock art - How our brains can get in the way of what we see. Examples from great rock art in Utah - Troy Scotter

ARARA presents...

Our brains are amazing things. They often operate in very “visible” ways. Imagine that I ask you questions about ARARA: Who is the ARARA vice president? How many members do we have? What is our website address? With a little work you could answer those questions. Maybe you would put names to faces, think about the number of people who attended the last conference, or hop on the computer to do some research. These slow, laborious processes are what we mostly think about in terms of decision making. But the bulk of our decisions are actually made by invisible processes that operate in the background. This presentation will talk about these slow, laborious processes and the more frequent fast/background processes.  Then we will transition to some of the implications of how we “see” rock art. I promise you a tour of some of the best rock art in Utah as examples. Finally, I’ll suggest some tools that might improve our perception of rock art.

Troy would be thrown out of any reputable archeology or anthropology program and refuses to spell "archeology" with an "a" in the middle of the word because it just looks too stuffy. But he has spent thirty years wandering around Utah being fascinated by the great rock art that he finds. Troy is past president of the Utah Rock Art Research Association (URARA) and currently serves on the URARA Board and as their conservation and preservation chair. Troy is also on the board of ARARA and serves as Treasurer, membership chair, manages the website, and generally creates chaos wherever he goes.