Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: PICTURE THIS: Using Chemistry to Date Ancient Cave Art

Marvin W. Rowe, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry
Texas A&M University

Tuesday, April 8, 2003, 7:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
Texas A&M University

Abstract

Pictographs-images painted on boulders and cave and rock shelter walls-provide us with spectacular evidence from prehistoric cultures worldwide. Improvements in recording methods involving detailed artistic renderings, digital photography with computer enhancement, and especially better interpretations of their meanings in some cases, have drawn attention to rock art research in recent years. Previously, without a way to place pictographs in time, archaeologists had mostly ignored these wonderful images, and their potential for providing insights into thought process of past cultures.

Over the past fifteen years, a method was developed at Texas A&M University that allows ancient pictograph paints to be radiocarbon dated. Images can now be cataloged and studied along with excavated cultural remains of a given time period and site. Being able to assign painted images to a particular prehistoric time period allows archaeologists to gain information on artistic, cultural, and religious aspects of an ancient people.

Dr. Rowe and his research team have dated rock paintings from many sites around the world. Dates have been determined for pictographs in Angola, Australia, Belize, Brazil, France, Guatemala, Mexico, Russia, and the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

About the Speaker

Dr. Marvin W. Rowe received a bachelor of science in petroleum engineering from New Mexico Tech, Socorro, New Mexico, and a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas. He also pursued post-doctoral studies in physics at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University since 1969. At various times in his career, he has also worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Colorado in Boulder, Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Antwerp in Belgium, the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago. He has received numerous awards for teaching and research, including the Castleton Award from the American Rock Art Research Association, the Association of Former Students Teaching Award in the College of Science, and the Nininger Meteorite Award. He is a Fellow of the Texas Academy of Science. He has served as an editor for Advances in Analytical Geochemistry, the Texas Journal of Science, and the Geochemical Journal as well as the author of many invited papers and journal articles.

Dr. Rowe teaches regularly teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels and has served as the faculty advisor for the Chemistry Club and as a judge at the Brazos Valley Regional Science and Engineering Fair.