Rock Art Research

Newberry Cave (CA-SBR-199 or SBCM 102) is a large, multi-chambered, dry cave in the eastern Mojave Desert, California, in the United States. The pre-Historic artefacts and paintings are unusual. The cave is important since its contents have been precisely dated and provide a window into practices of Late Archaic (2000–1000 calibrated BCE) people that used the cave. The authors posit that this was a multi-generational ceremonial site that was used by desert bighorn sheep hunters as a place for rituals and ancestor veneration. We argue that Newberry Cave is a likely example of ‘increase totemism’, and we further hypothesise that Newberry Cave was a site for a men’s bighorn sheep, totemic, hunting society (exogamous moiety or clan). Rituals appear to have been conducted to promote the life and health of a supernatural, ancestral, totemic animal — the desert bighorn sheep. Newberry Cave rock paintings are consistent with and relate to this central principle of increase and fertility. We suggest that the predominant green colour, employed for the cave paintings and portable artefacts, may have acted as a symbolic metaphor for life renewal, vitality, increase, fertility and fecundity. Data and evidence to support these hypotheses are presented.