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UCA Professor Discovers Ancient Rock Painting

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Bianca
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« on: April 15, 2009, 05:50:11 pm »

 









                                                   UCA professor discovers ancient rock painting






April 14, 2009

Dr. Reinaldo (Dito) Morales Jr., assistant professor of art history at UCA, has confirmed a major discovery in the world of rock art: an ancient rock painting at a burial site from the Inca site of Machu Picchu in Peru.

Morales announced his discovery today at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Atlanta and plans to submit a manuscript about his discovery, New Rock Art at Old Machu Picchu, to a scholarly journal.

Dr. Jeff Young, chair of the Department of Art, said he believes Morales' discovery could be a significant contribution to the research at Machu Picchu as well as a great step for UCA's department.

"As faculty, we are always excited when one of our colleagues accomplishes something of note," Young said. "It will be interesting, as he publishes his findings, to see how other rock art researchers, art historians and archeologists respond to his research."

Morales discovered the painting in 2000 while on a three-day graduate school research trip. The painting is located on a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site, Machu Picchu, which has been the subject of scientific study for nearly 100 years.

However, after trying to find research on the painting over the past eight years, Morales said he has not found any mention of this particular painting even though the nearly 50-foot rock on which it appears is a popular tourist attraction passed by approximately 70,000 tourists in 2007 alone.

"I have pored through the [research] literature," Morales said. "I am still waiting on a couple more things that may come in, but I don’t think [the literature] will mention this work."

Morales said he has been scouring over resources for the past few years and has tried to read every book and journal that includes any mention of rock art in Peru.

"I have tried to find every single source, including a national inventory of rock art in Peru that mentions rock art nearby, but not this site," Morales said.

Although Morales discovered the painting in 2000, he never actually thought about the importance of what it could be until recently. He said he assumed, after first seeing it in 2000, that the painting had already been discovered and researched. He said he just took a few pictures and then went back with his graduate class.

"[The painting] has sort of been eating at the back of my mind for a while," Morales said. "It sort of bothered me. So a couple of years ago, after I started to get grant money through UCA to continue my research, I started thinking of going back to Machu Picchu."

So last year, Morales traveled to the site in the Peruvian Andes to confirm the painting’s location and to document the painting through his own personal sketches and photos.

"This past December, I confirmed that it is a painting," Morales said. "It looks, to my eye, very prehistoric."

The painting has developed a calcium deposit over it, which Morales said could take a thousand years or more to form.

Although the painting is in an Inca environment, Morales said he does not believe his discovered painting to be from that culture because Incan art is typically dominated by rectilinear geometric patterns, whereas this painting is primarily curvilinear.

"This painting doesn't look like the painting style we typically see on Killke pottery, which immediately preceded the 15th-century Inka in this region, but my research on this style is still ongoing," Morales said. "In my proposal, I’ve said it looks like the Recuay, [a Peruvian culture] who are much, much earlier than the Inca - 1,000 or 1,500 years earlier than the Inca, and from a completely different part of Peru.

"So it doesn’t make much sense that this would be [the Recuay’s] stuff. In any case, looking at the Recuay ceramics, that's the closest thing I can figure out to it, but they don’t belong there. So I have no idea who may have done this."

He has also had his paper about the discovery, along with six other papers, accepted for the International Congress of Rock Art, "Global Art," sponsored by the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations and the Associação Brasileira de Arte Rupestre (Brazilian Rock Art Association). The congress will run from June 29 until July 3 in São Raimundo Nonato, Piauí, Brazil.



http://www.uca.edu/news/index.php?itemid=2196
« Last Edit: April 19, 2009, 07:48:21 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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Bianca
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« Reply #1 on: April 19, 2009, 07:41:53 am »












                                            UCA professor finds ancient rock painting in Peru






BY DEBRA HALE-SHELTON
Posted on Friday, April 17, 2009
Special 
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette




REINALDO MORALES JR. Reinaldo "Dito" Morales Jr., an assistant professor of art history at the University of Central Arkansas, will formally announce his finding of an ancient painting at Peru's Machu Picchu at next week's annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Atlanta.

 
- A University of Central Arkansas professor said Thursday that he has discovered an ancient rock painting at an Inca burial site in the Peruvian Andes and believes the work could be anywhere from 500 to 2,000 years old.

Tens of thousands of tourists each year pass the nearly 50-foot rock at Machu Picchu, a site scientists have studied for nearly a century. But apparently no one has paid attention to the barely visible painting, said Reinaldo "Dito" Morales Jr., assistant professor of art history.

Morales is to announce his finding formally April 24 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Atlanta.

Morales, 45, first saw the rock art in 2000 when he was a graduate student. At the time, he said, "I figured [that] this place is so famous, surely everyone knows about it."

But after he later obtained funding to return to Peru in December 2008, he began digging into the area's art history.

"I've been scouring every journal, book, any kind of publication that discusses Machu Picchu or the rock art there" and haven't found even a mention of this work, he said.

The black painting - likely done with charcoal or the mineral manganese - is partly obscured by a calcium deposit, which Morales said could take hundreds of years or longer to form. No one really knows what the painting depicts or who created it.

But when a drawing of it is su- perimposed upon a photograph Morales took, the painting appears to be "some kind of animal imagery," said James Farmer, an associate professor and chairman of the art history department at Virginia Commonwealth University, where Morales did his doctoral dissertation.

Morales said, "I don't know if it's supposed to represent something or if it's just some sort of abstract geometrical marks. That's the question of the century for rock-art studies."

Farmer, who has traveled to Peru since the discovery and saw the drawing, said, "Someone probably has seen this [painting in the past], but ... what is significant ... is that no one has ever really paid much attention to it if, in fact, they had seen it. ... Apparently, [Morales is] the first modern person who certainly noticed it and brought it to the attention of anybody.

"It's very easy to miss," Farmer said. "Even knowing where it was, I had to go up there and look for it. It doesn't jump out at you. It's hard to locate, and it's hard to see."

Art historians already knew of engravings at Machu Picchu. But Morales said, "This is the very first painting ever documented at Machu Picchu."

Historians believe Pachacuti, the Incas' first emperor, built Machu Picchu as a royal winter retreat in the Andean mountains in about 1450. Morales and Farmer believe the work predates the Incas' presence at Machu Picchu, which translates to big mountain or big peak.

Morales said he's convinced the image is not of Incan origin "because Incan art is typically dominated by rectilinear geometric patterns, whereas this painting is primarily curvilinear."

Farmer said the painting "stylistically looks rather similar to other rock-art traditions ... that we know are much earlier.

"Just in terms of what the image appears to represent, it just doesn't look very Inca," he added.

"You could be talking about something that dates back to 5000 B.C.," Farmer said. "It is stylistically similar to some other things in the Andes" from that time. But some parts of the painting are in goodenough condition that it might be just 500 years old, he said.

While it's probably not Inca in origin, the question of "whom we would assign origin to is going to be a much more difficult question to grapple with," Farmer said. "I think that would be sort of the first wave of research."

Because Morales does not want to risk damaging the work, he has not even touched the painting.

"It's not worth ruining, just for temporary satisfaction," he said.

Carbon dating, which would involve scraping off a tiny piece of the work, would ruin that small portion and might not even work if there's not enough organic material to test, Morales said.

The International Congress of Rock Art has accepted a paper Morales wrote about the discovery and will meet this summer in Brazil.

« Last Edit: April 19, 2009, 07:44:51 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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