An Indigenous Archive: Documenting Comanche History through Rock Art

Abstract:Over the past thirty years, incorporating Native American voices into North American history has become a guiding principle of academic scholarship within both history and archaeology. While scholars have turned to an expanded array of evidence, including oral histories, ethnography, and material culture, to develop complex narratives about Indigenous pasts, they have largely treated these sources as alternatives to the written record. In this article, we argue that Biographic-style rock art is a historical text in its own right. Composed by and for Native people, this iconographic tradition is an "Indigenous archive" that can be read by archaeologists in collaboration with Indigenous community members. We develop this concept of the Indigenous archive through an analysis of rock art produced by Comanche people in the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico during the eighteenth century. A close examination of these images, accompanied by conversations with Comanche tribal members offers historical insights into the process of constructing and interpreting Indigenous history.