Grants

The Rock Art Archive received initial operating grants from the I. H. and Anna Grancell Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation and the Foundation for Archaeology and Rock Art. In 1987 Helen Michaelis, who served as Archivist from 1983-1993, and her family provided the Archive with a generous endowment, the income from which assures many of our programs.

  • Michaelis Family Fellowship
    In 1996, the Michaelis Family Fellowship was announced. This is a small grant was designed to assist student researchers with field work costs.
   
   

Sidsel Millerstrom, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the first Michaelis Family Grant in Rock Art Research by the Rock Art Archive. Her project, entitled "Images Carved in Stone and Landscape Archeology in Hatiheu Valley, Nuku Hiva, Marquesas Islands," has amassed quantities of rock art data from the north coast of Nuku Hiva, where an especially rich prehistoric rock carving tradition exists.

    
   

As of 1990, Millerstrom had recorded 2256 individual motifs located on some 360 separate boulders. Taking a settlement-pattern approach to collecting her data, she proceeded to systematically map all architectural structures and features lying between two major rivers, Puhioho and Vaiuua, in the western section of the valley. Carbon samples were collected at rock art sites associated with some of this architecture, most of which appears to date from a single construction period. The analysis of these samples is expected to yield an independent line of evidence, allowing Millerstrom to place the rock art imagery within a preliminary time frame.