Research article Gesture and performance in Comanche rock art Severin Fowles a * and Jimmy Arterberry b a Department of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, USA; b Comanche Nation Tribal Historic Preservation Office, Lawton, USA 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. Keywords: rock art; American Southwest; performance; Comanche society For much of the twentieth century, anthropological archaeologists in the United States vigilantly policed the disciplinary boundary that separated them from two dangerous doppelgangers, both of whom seemed to skulk about with an uneasy proximity to the archaeological project: treasure hunters and art historians. It is self-evident why archaeologists would want to distinguish themselves from treasure hunters and the looters of sites. Undisciplined, usually illegal, driven by greed rather than the pursuit of knowledge, the treasure hunter was supposed to stand for everything the archaeologist was not, even if the general public could be excused for missing some of the subtleties between digging slowly with a trowel and more quickly with a pick axe. Boundary maintenance between anthropological archaeology and art history was more complicated (see Bradley 2009). Of course, there has always been a kind of implicit accusation that the art historical gaze indirectly, and sometimes directly, encourages the growth of the anti- quities trade and, in turn, the further looting of sites. However, the more fundamental accusation had to do with the archaeologist’s (generally *Corresponding author. Email: sfowles@barnard.edu World Art, 2013 Vol. 3, No. 1, 67 82, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2013.773937 # 2013 Taylor & Francis