Arizonian adventures

A linguist documents rock art dating back 300,000 years and finds that the same 15 patterns are repeated in rock art all over the world

A linguist documents rock art dating back 300,000 years and finds that the same 15 patterns are repeated in rock art all over the world
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. A half-dozen times, he descended with his rope, photographed the cliff face and climbed back up.

He was documenting a rock art panel a quarter-mile long in northern Arizona. These adventures are commonplace for Malotki, a German-born American who is now 69.
Malotki fell in love with America8217;s desert Southwest as a 20-something graduate student of languages at the University of California, San Diego. There, he debunked the long-standing notion that the Hopi tribe of northern Arizona did not talk about time. He believes time is a fundamental, universal concept that is likely to appear in the words of any human culture, and with respect to the Hopi, he was right. As a linguist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Malotki spent decades chronicling the nuanced Hopi tongue.

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.

Malotki has published three books about rock art, including The Rock Art of Arizona: Art for Life8217;s Sake. He has taken thousands of photographs, and he keeps his secret GPS coordinates in files that line his office walls. Malotki8217;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.

8220;Phosphenes have been defined as a kind of test pattern of the visual system,8221; 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. 8220;This hypothesis has never been falsified, and it stands nearly 30 years later,8221; he said.

Many archaeologists have neglected these ancient symbols in recent decades, Malotki said, because of a view that 8220;they didn8217;t allow insight into the minds of the creators8221;. He disagrees. 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. Malotki, 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.
Bednarik called Malotki8217;s photographs 8220;sublime8221; and he said they were important to the preservation and protection of rock art.
_ANNE MINARD, NYT