LAS LOOKING GLASS

Anna Roosevelt

Why is Anthropology Professor Anna Roosevelt Playing Tic-Tac-Toe on an Amazonian Cliff?

Anna Roosevelt isn’t actually playing a round of the child’s pencil-and-paper game. She is actually looking at ancient rock art, high in the rock outcrops overlooking the Amazon at Monte Alegre. She says, “Many of the rocks and caves here have been painted with large panels of red, yellow, orange, or brown designs. The panels sometimes extend for several hundreds of meters along the rock faces, and some of the designs are more than a meter across. They are visible from a long distance away.

“You have to climb 15 minutes straight up from the dirt road to reach the panel in the picture. It is one of my favorite places—a sort of amphitheatre-shaped space area walled on two sides with the painted rock outcrops and with views of the forest and Amazon floodplain in the distance. I was there with a class of Brazilian undergrads, UIC grad students and other professors from my Fulbright environmental archaeology field training course at the Federal University of Para, Santarem.

“The tic-tac-toe-like image I am pointing to is a large quadrate pattern that may be some kind of tally or calendar.

“The Monte Alegre paintings appear to date to an age more than 10,000 years ago, to judge from our excavations in a painted cave below these panels. We found in the earliest cave layers iron oxide pigment that chemically matched paint of the images on the cave walls.”

Professor of Anthropology A.C. Roosevelt (PhD, Columbia University) researches human prehistory and land use sustainability in tropical forest Amazonia and the Congo. The former Curator of Archaeology at the Field Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt has published six books and over 85 articles, and received countless numerous distinctions for her work. The winner of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Explorers Medal, Gold Medal of the Society of Women Geographers, she is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Royal Geographical Society, amongst others.

References:

A. C. Roosevelt, M. Lima Costa, C. Lopes Machado, M. Michab, N. Mercier, H. Valladas, J. Feathers, W. Barnett, M. Imazio da Silveira, A. Henderson, J. Sliva, B. Chernoff, D. Reese, J.A. Holman, N. Toth, and K. Schick) 1996 Paleoindian Cave Dwellers in the Amazon: The Peopling of the Americas. Science 272: 373-384.