Picturing Deer

Good fortune. A sunny, dry day walking in Kilmartin Glen, a May day four years ago. Along my way, not far from the two-lane road, I found myself in the silence, an outsider, alone with the Dunchraigaig Cairn. Kilmartin, mid-Argyll, western Scotland: An Animate Landscape! Yet, that day the 4000-year-old deer carvings lingered in the dark.

In 2020 Hamish Fenton announced the discovery of the carvings on the underside of the cairn’s massive capstone, 4 meters in length and est. 5 tons. A 2022 paper wonderfully titled, Revealing the Earliest Animal Engravings in Scotland: The Dunchraigaig Deer, Kilmartin, documents and investigates the context and implications. (Below digital 3-D scan)

“Although clearly representational, the deer carvings at Dunchraigaig are nevertheless as ambiguous as the abstract cup-and-ring motifs in this area. Their meaning and purpose are as obscured and restricted to us as their physical location within the cist.” Revealing, 2022

Dunchraigaig Cairn, Placard on-site and morning views (top and below, 2019. Photos Douglas Beauchamp

“The discovery also reinforces the special character of Kilmartin Glen as one of the most original and remarkable Neolithic–Bronze Age landscapes of monumentality and rock art in Britain.” Revealing, 2022. 

Below, schematic of carvings which the study determined were made on the stone sometime before placed as the cairn capstone.

Deer carvings are rare among the thousands of petroglyphs in the Northern Great Basin. Pictured below, three who have encountered me traipsing in basalt-rimmed sage-lands of southern Oregon. As imaging and imagining, compare or align with the Kilmartin deer carvings. How do you see? 

NOTES & LINKS

— Revealing the Earliest Animal Engravings in Scotland: The Dunchraigaig Deer, Kilmartin.  The 2022 study by Joana Valdez-Tullett and Tertia Barnett and team from Scotland’s Rock Art Project  

— Prehistoric animal carvings discovered for the first time in Scotland. May 2021 New release with links to images of digital scans.

— Dunchraigaig: Cairn (Bronze Age), Carved Stone (Prehistoric)

— An Animate Landscape: Rock Art and the Prehistory of Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland (2011). Andrew Meirion Jones and team.

“The Kilmartin landscape in western Scotland is widely regarded as Scotland's richest prehistoric landscape. It contains a number of barrow cemeteries, stone alignments, stone circles and a henge. With over 250 individual rock art sites, it also has the greatest concentration of prehistoric rock art in the British Isles and some of the most impressive rock art sites.”

Military-Industrial in Paradise

Petroglyph located within Paradise North, a Special Use Airspace (SUA) of Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Paradise North — also known as Owyhee Canyonlands in Malheur County, Oregon.

Map indicates SUA sectors of the Military Operations Area (MOA) in Oregon, idaho and Nevada. BLUE star locates petroglyphs and canyonlands in all photos (DB) click to enlarge.

The Department of the Air Force (DAF) produced thousands of pages as Final Environmental Impact Statement for Airspace Optimization for Readiness for Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho

Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA): “Air Force’s plan will increase the number of booming super-sonic flights over southeastern Oregon by 316 percent, to 6,894 flights per year, while allowing jets to fly just 100 feet off the ground!”  Threats to the Owyhee Canyonlands 

DAF: Jet flights 100 Feet above ground level (AGL): "No adverse effects to archaeological or architectural resources and ... no effect on traditional cultural properties" in the SUA. Executive Summary of Final EIS

 

Meanwhile, In Nevada just west of Paradise South: Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. RED star on map above.

General Motors (GM) and Lithium Americas (Canadian corp) will invest $650 million to develop "the largest known source of lithium in the United States and the third largest in the world."

Opposed by Protect Thacker Pass and  Paiute and Shoshone people of three Native Tribes:  Reno-Sparks Indian Colony; Burns Paiute Tribe; Winnemucca Indian Colony.

Remembering how President and former general Dwight Eisenhower, in this farewell address, January 17, 1961, warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."

Clear enough. We've been warned. Complexes mutate, proliferate, optimize, establish as Military-Extraction-Capitalist readiness variants. 

Yet, these marked stones endure in deepening witness, as they have for thousands of turnings around the sun.

In sum, an encompassing scholarly perspective:

The desert exists at the complex intersection of nature, history, and power, though too often it has been imagined and imaged flatly: reduced to an instrument of the state that upholds political and economic power structures. Thinking more expansively about deserts requires a shift to epistemological and ontological frameworks that honor and prioritize a future for dry environments that is anti-colonial, socially and environmentally just, and multidimensional.

— Danika Cooper, from “Drawing Deserts, Making Worlds,” in Deserts Are Not Empty, Samia Henni, ed.(2022)