Drawing Upon the Past: Temporal Ontology and Mythological Ideology in South-central Californian Rock Art

The increasing influence of New Animism is providing useful ways of interpreting rock art as well as ways to move beyond generalizing models based upon Cartesian principles. However, the increasing attention to animism runs the risk of simply replacing one generalization with another. To avoid the pitfalls of generalization, this article sets out to explore the ways in which relational ontology may have been communicated throughout indigenous society in a specific case study from south-central California. To do this requires adopting a ‘third space’ approach (Porr & Bell 2011) to detail the didactic and pedagogical narrative roles of rock art and mythology in south-central California. Paraphrasing Bird-David (2006), the goal is to understand how an animistic epistemology is enacted into an institutionalized way of knowing. To do this, I look closely at new information on rock-art chronology in conjunction with mythological narratives. It is suggested that the vibrant pictographs of the region drew upon ontological notions of the past embodied at specific places in the landscape and that the narrative structure of myth helps inform our understanding of the narrative structure of rock-art composition. This provides an appreciation of indigenous perceptions of time, which in turn shows that mythology was a template for human institutions while explaining rock art as another ontological institution that was part-and-parcel of relational ideologies associated with ‘delayed-return’ complex societies of south-central California.