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| Image: Fremont Culture Art |
The Independent
Southern Utah is full of amazing rock art, and visitors to several different locales around the area can get a glimpse into the past, seeing depictions in pictographs, petroglyphs and hieroglyphs of everything from horticultural practices to cosmic phenomena. Rock art compels interest from both researchers and the broader public, inspiring many hypotheses about its cultural origin and meaning. However, it can be notoriously difficult to date numerically. On Saturday, May 30, as part of the the Zion Canyon Field Institute’s Fern and J. L. Crawford Lecture Series, Dr. Steven Simms will present a lecture entitled “Dating Barrier Canyon Rock Art at the Great Gallery: Later Than We Thought and Implications for the Ancient History of Utah.” The event is free to the public and will start at 7:30 p.m. at the Canyon Community Center, located at 126 Lion Blvd. in Springdale.
Barrier Canyon-style (BCS) pictographs of the Colorado Plateau are among the most debated examples of this struggle to place rock art at a particular moment in time. Hypotheses about its age span the entire Holocene epoch, and previous attempts at direct radiocarbon dating have failed. Dr. Simms’ lecture will focus on the Great Gallery panel, the type section of BCS art in Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah.
Dr. Simms received his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Utah and began working at Utah State University in 1988. His first archaeology experience in 1972 was under the tutelage of the legendary “Dark Lord,” Jesse D. Jennings at the University of Utah. Since then he has had the chance to learn from other great field archaeologists by doing archaeology in the western and southeastern United States. Dr. Simms has also studied at the University of Nevada, Reno and the University of Pittsburgh. Each of these schools had theoretically sophisticated scholars who showed him that questions are more powerful than the answers. Dr. Simms has produced two books: “Ancient Peoples of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau” is a general synthesis of western prehistory and “Traces of Fremont: Society and Rock Art in Ancient Utah” employs the stunning photography of rock art and artifacts by Francois Gohier as a vehicle to propose new thinking on the nature of the Fremont culture.
The Zion Canyon Field Institute’s Fern and J. L. Crawford Lecture Series is a collaborative presentation of ZCFI and the Division of Resource Management in Zion National Park. For more information please call (435) 772-3264. Lectures are free and open to the public. Zion Canyon Field Institute is the educational arm of Zion Natural History Association, the park’s non-profit partner.
