Wlell, done Ekkehart ! Even we, in Cambridge (... Uk), read it!

Mila + Ludwig

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Pursuing US Southwest's prehistoric rock art

In his mid-60s, Ekkehart Malotki, a retired linguistics professor,
willingly dangled from a rope tied to a car that was backed to the
edge of a cliff. He was documenting a rock art panel a quarter-mile
long in northern Arizona (USA). Dr. Malotki fell in love with
America's desert Southwest as a 20-something graduate student of
languages at the University of California, San Diego. There, he
debunked the longstanding notion that the Hopi tribe of northern
Arizona did not talk about time. As a linguist at Northern Arizona
University in Flagstaff, Dr. Malotki spent decades chronicling the
nuanced Hopi tongue.
Dr. Malotki began roaming the desert in pursuit of Kokopelli,
the southwestern deity depicted as a man playing a flute, which had
been incorrectly linked with a Hopi kachina, or spirit. He found much
evidence to dispel the association. And everywhere he went, he found
art: pot shards, carved petroglyphs and painted pictographs. He has
published three books about rock art, including 'The Rock Art of
Arizona: Art for Life's Sake,' which is the first to document rock art
through the ages, across the entire state. He has taken thousands of
photographs, and he keeps his secret GPS coordinates in files that
line his office walls. "It's a disease that is incurable," he said.
"This is my bliss, going out in search of rock art."
Dr. Malotki's latest focus is on designs called phosphenes,
which are as fundamental to art as time is to language. He said the
same 15 abstract geometric constants appear globally in art created as
early as 300,000 years ago. They are grids, zigzags and patterns of
dots. They are the first objects drawn by children; we doodle them
when we talk on the phone. "Phosphenes have been defined as a kind of
test pattern of the visual system," said Robert Bednarik, a rock art
expert in Australia. He said he had determined three decades ago that
all prefigurative art consisted entirely of phosphene motifs. "This
hypothesis has never been falsified, and it stands nearly 30 years
later," he said.
Many archaeologists have neglected these ancient symbols in
recent decades, Dr. Malotki said, because of a view that "they didn't
allow insight into the minds of the creators." He disagrees. Dr.
Malotki has brought rock art to the attention of Ellen Dissanayake, an
independent evolutionary psychologist affiliated with the University
of Washington. She has argued that art, especially music, is part of
our biology, as expressed through the mode and filter of culture. Dr.
Malotki, Ms. Dissanayake and Henry Wallace of the Center for Desert
Archaeology, a conservation group, have embarked on a book project to
show that the earliest rock art was linked with human survival.

Source: The New York Times (8 September 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/5j9rdo