Dating Barrier Canyon Rock Art at the Great Gallery, Canyonlands National Park: Later Than We Thought and Implications for the Ancient History of Utah

Rock art compels interest from both researchers and a broader public, inspiring many hypotheses about its cultural origin and meaning, but it is notoriously difficult to date numerically. Barrier Canyon-style (BCS) pictographs of the Colorado Plateau are among the most debated examples; hypotheses about its age span the entire Holocene epoch and previous attempts at direct radiocarbon dating have failed. Results provide a maximum possible age, a minimum age, and an exposure time window for the creation of the Great Gallery panel, respectively. Our age result of A.D. ∼1–1100 coincides better with the transition from the Archaic to the Fremont culture; a time when indigenous Archaic foragers encountered immigrant Basketmaker II farmers bringing maize agriculture north of the Colorado River.

This presentation summarizes the geological dating, and targets the human behavioral context in which the Great Gallery was produced. Our dating suggests that Barrier Canyon Style rock art was an artistic tradition that spanned cultures and arose out of a time of fundamental change in the lives of Utah’s ancient inhabitants.