Gordon Ambrosino

GORDON ROBERTSON AMBROSINO, then a graduate student at Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia, received a grant in April 2016 to aid research on ‘Rock Art, Ancestors and Water: The Semiotic Construction of Landscapes in the PreHispanic, Central Andes,’ supervised by Dr. Alexander Herrera. As landscape art, the rock art of the Central Andes offers clues regarding relationships between ancestor veneration and the negotiation of water rights at strategic places of power. To evaluate this, the present thesis focuses on 192 previously undocumented rock art places on the Fortaleza Ignimbrite (FI), a distinct geological formation, at the headwaters of the Fortaleza and Santa rivers (Ancash, Peru), which display a long temporal span of production and specific relationships between rock art types and images, within specific ecological settings. To analyze these relationships, archaeological stratigraphy from four of these places (three highland caves located above 14,000 f.a.s.l and the historically documented tomb of Pallauta 11,200 f.a.s.l.) is paired with the stratigraphy of carved and painted rock art to develop a typological sequence, and a spatiotemporal map of image types for the rock art of the FI, spanning 3,500 years. More specifically, these methods revealed that rock art production at the caves occurred during two main periods, the first between 1500-200 B.C.E. and the second between 600- 1824 A.D., while results from Pallauta indicate that this art panel was produced in one event, approximately around 1350 A.D., confirming 16th century historic accounts.