Handprints In Montana Rock Art

Abstract

Human hands are portrayed in rock art in much of Montana, but are most frequent in the central part of the state where they are the only kind of figure at five sites. Production categories in Montana include impressed hands, stylized hands, and negative hands. Of the hands currently recorded in Montana, the impressed and negative categories are actual physical representations of hands and are therefore important for suggestions on the age and gender of the painters or participants themselves. Positive hand impressions outnumber other categories 6:1. In central Montana these occur mostly on open bluffs that probably functioned as public markers relaying information to people passing the site. Freehand paintings of hands (“ stylized ”) occur mostly in cave sites that appear to have a ceremonial function.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.