Quarrying sacred landscapes: Indigenous perceptions of animate rocks, potent pigments, and transformational art.

Jamie Hampson 

Humans have quarried rock for non-economic purposes for tens of thousands of years. Indeed, many Indigenous groups believe that the very ochre used to create their exquisitely beautiful rock art motifs is imbued with supernatural potency; some refer to paintings as living beings, or powerful ‘things in themselves’. In parts of California, the Indigenous word for ‘pigment’ was – and still is – the same as the word for ‘supernatural spirit’. In other places where I have been fortunate enough to be invited to walk alongside, and learn from, Indigenous groups – in the mountains and deserts of southern Africa, west Texas, Canada, India, and Australia – it has become quickly apparent that some rocks, and some pigment sources, were and are more sacred than others. Californian Chumash groups, for example, consider ochre blocks quarried from hot springs – and other important liminal ‘portals’ and places within the sacred landscape – to contain particularly intense ‘atiswin, or supernatural potency. Archaeological, anthropological, and historical records make clear that in the past, ritualistic pigment was traded over huge distances; local quarrying sites, with ‘weaker’ and less potent rocks, were often ignored. 

The Power of Quartz.

Quartz, of course, was (and is) considered a particularly special and important rock, and indeed animistic agent, in the sense that quartz does things – in many Indigenous worldviews, quartz is intensely potent and held in particularly high esteem. Recently, a South African colleague and I (Pargeter & Hampson 2019) published a study of Indigenous quartz use from a dual and intertwined symbolic and functionalist perspective; we aimed to challenge (and hopefully break down) rigid but rarely scrutinised ‘Western’ divisions such as animate:inanimate and nature:culture. (Justin Pargeter is a world expert on lithic technology, particularly in the pre-Holocene eras i.e. before 10,000 BC, when many groups started to shift from hunting, gathering, and pastoralist practices to more settled forms of farming. He knows more than most about the importance of rocks in that wonderfully- and evocatively-phrased era, Deep Time! See below for references, and further reading suggestions.) 

In our recent paper, published in the journal Antiquity, Justin and I do not argue that ‘power objects’ such as quartz crystals were used in exactly the same way from region to region, or from place to place – but we do point out that there are undeniable overarching similarities (as well as nuanced differences) that cannot be ignored. Some of these overarching similarities span centuries and even millennia. The application of our model, we argue, has both potential and utility when assessing sacred landscapes, extraction, and the role of Earth and Environmental Humanities today.

Many Indigenous groups and their ritual specialists tell us that quartz is ‘emergent’ and/or alive. For the Cubeo of the northwest Amazon, for instance, a key process in becoming a shaman is the insertion of quartz into the neophyte’s stomach. Similarly, in the Western Desert of Australia, some engraved rock art motifs (especially human figures, some of which are many thousands of years old) are executed so as to position the naturally occurring quartz veins and crystal inclusions in the location of the motif’s stomach. These figures are said by Aboriginal Martu custodians and traditional owners to be mabarn, that is embodied with magical and medicinal powers; interestingly, both the quartz crystals and ‘medicine men and women’ are termed mabarn in this part of Australia. Not far from here, in the Pilbara region of Western Australia (where Rio Tinto, Woodside, BHP, and other international companies have large scale mines today), Indigenous teachers over the years have told us that shamans and other ritual specialists used quartz crystals to kill malevolent spirits and threatening serpents. Clearly, quartz is valued not just because it shines and sparkles.

Into the Spirit World.

Ethnographic accounts also show that quartz is closely associated with ‘otherworldly’ vision and communication, within and between the mundane and spirit worlds. Desana ritual specialists in Amazonia, for instance, refer to quartz crystals as vehicles that enable communication with both humans and non-humans – and with both living and non-living things – on earth but also in the spirit worlds above and below ground. In altered states of consciousness, Desana shamans imagine themselves standing inside a large crystal that enables them to see through forests and even mountains. In certain circumstances, neurologists have also confirmed that the refraction of light produced by crystals sometimes initiates a neurological event that, if nurtured and encouraged, leads to altered states of consciousness and preternatural vision.

When quartz breaks or is rubbed, of course, bright light (technically, ‘triboluminescence’) is released – and this is frequently interpreted as ‘spiritual power’. At Sally’s Rock Shelter in California, for example, quartz was deliberately chosen as a material for hammerstones to make engravings – the use of these hammerstones to engrave rocks produces hundreds of flying sparks. Also present at Sally’s Rock Shelter are quartz crystals wedged in cracks, perhaps placed to penetrate the membrane between this world and the spirit world (for more on this, and arguments around the motivations for the production of rock art, see https://uec.academia.edu/JamieHampson and the further reading section below). In Arnhem Land (northern Australia) there is a similarly wide-ranging link between certain stone tools and ‘ancestral power’: quartz and quartz tools at times shimmer in an almost iridescent manner – as do many of the painted rock art motifs, including those available for public viewing in Kakadu National Park. (If you have a chance one day, then go – you won’t be disappointed!) This symbolic use of stone and ochre pigment again challenges purely functionalist explanations for choices of raw materials.

In First Nations Canada, there is a widespread association between rock art sites, quartz, manitou (spirits), and Thunderbirds, the guardian spirits and animal helpers of many ritual specialists. The Kennedy Island (Ontario) site, for instance, features a Thunderbird motif formed by the addition of wings to quartz seams in the rock face. According to the Cree, Thunderbirds fire lightning bolts out of their eyes in order to kill mythical Horned Snakes; if the bolts miss the target, they form quartz seams that run through and over cliffs.

In South Africa in the 19th century, /Xam San Bushmen told explorers that different rocks were used to assert emblemic style between groups. Indeed, the revered teacher /Hano≠kass'o' remarked that while his people, the Flat Bushmen, now made arrows with metal, the Grass Bushmen to the west still used white stone (a synonym for quartz). And despite the availability of alternative, stronger rocks for arrowhead production, other 19th century San groups used tips made of glass or crystal quartz. 

Not all rocks are equal, then – and Humanities scholars have a role to play in reminding people that, for tens of thousands of years, some rocks were extracted from sacred landscapes for reasons that were not just simply economic. 

JAMIE HAMPSON

Jamie is a Senior Lecturer, and also the Director of the MA in International Heritage, at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus j.g.hampson@exeter.ac.uk

Further reading: Hampson 2016 (Rock Art and Regional Identity: A Comparative Perspective; London: Routledge); Hampson 2013 (The materiality of rock art and quartz: a case study from Mpumalanga Province, South Africa; Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23: 363–72); Pargeter & Hampson 2019 (Crystal quartz materiality in terminal Pleistocene Lesotho; Antiquity 367: 11–27); Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971 (Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious symbolism of the Tukano Indians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Robinson 2013 (Drawing upon the past: temporal ontology and mythological ideology in south-central Californian rock art; Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23: 373–94); Taçon 1991 (The power of stone: symbolic aspects of stone use and tool development in western Arnhem Land, Australia; Antiquity 65: 192–207); Whitley et al. 1999 (Sally’s rockshelter and the archaeology of the vision quest; Cambridge Archaeological Journal 9: 221–47). See also: https://uec.academia.edu/JamieHampson