Gesture and performance in Comanche rock art

This paper examines a corpus of rock art images produced by ancestral Comanches during the early eighteenth century. The images were lightly scratched and the gestures that produced them left behind only the faintest of traces. With careful study, one can read these traces, organize them into icons, and interpret them as finished products. Yet in doing so one obscures the core logic that made the rock art a potent mode of expression within Comanche society. Indeed, the primary ‘image’, we propose, was not the scratched icon left behind, but instead the gestural hand and body movements of the rock art as a performative event. This proposition leads us into a broader consideration of mimetic performance, the sociality of rock art, and the role of image production in the careers of Comanche warriors.