Biopsychological Aspects of Chumash Rock Art

Abstract

The particular case of Chumash rock art is suggestive if inconclusive. Grant (1965) has described the pictographs and petroglyphs of the Santa Barbara hinterland in some detail, and has isolated most of the design elements utilized by the native artists. These design elements (many of which are shown in Fig. 3) seem to me to be often strikingly similar to the experimentally induced phosphenes in Fig. 1, although I am not enough of an artist to make the kind of rigorous stylistic comparison of the two motif sets that would be desirable. However, the similarities appear to be extensive and systematic, and I feel that they provide additional support to the suggestion that many of the paintings were inspired by hallucinatory phenomena associated with the ingestion of Datura inoxia. Future research on Chumash rock art might explore this hypothesis further, and utilize as well our newly acquired information concerning the nature of Chumash myth and ritual (Blackburn 1976; Hudson et al. 1977). It seems likely to me that what we are seeing in much of Chumash rock art are individual expressions of mythological themes or characters as "seen" or experienced by the artists as a direct or indirect consequence of ingesting a known hallucinogenic substance. The universal visual phenomena, phosphenes, provide basic stimuli which are filtered through the screen of cultural interpretation and myth to provide powerful religious symbols; to fully interpret these, we must learn more in the future about both the biopsychological aspects of the art and the intervening cultural screen, and about the process of interaction between the two. Here studies of contemporary situations involving the ritual use of psychoactive substances (such as Reichel-Dolmatoffs pioneering work among the Tukano) should be of considerable help. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future we will be able to approach prehistoric art in a new way, and not just look, but see.

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