by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

Just released after 10 years in the making, “Rock Art: An American Story” documents rock art across the United States through the lens of award-winning National Geographic photographer Stephen Alvarez. Although marketed as a coffee-table book, this stunning volume transcends the typical coffee-table book genre by light years. The photographs are accompanied by 12 journal entries speaking from voices who reflect on their personal relationship with the rock art depicted, a relationship dating back thousands of years. All the essayists are Native Americans, artists, archeologists, researchers, and writers who lay claim to an intimate connection.

“I connect best as a photographer,” Alvarez said. “But these are not my stories. I don’t have a cultural connection. Finding the right people took 10 years. Otherwise, I would have been just another redneck with an opinion.”

Asked the chicken-or-the-egg question about whether the photographs or the voices came first, Alvarez described the process as “organic.” Alvarez met artist and designer Dustin Illetewahke Mater when doing contract work for the Chickasaw tribe. “I found Dustin’s story fascinating,” Alvarez said. “He began painting and drawing because his mind was filled with stories from his Chickasaw great-grandmother. He didn’t have any visuals to hang the stories on.” Mater contributed a journal entry about Devil’s Step Hollow at the head of the Sequatchie Valley.

Alvarez struck up a friendship with novelist Debra Magpie Earling when Earling gave a School of Letters reading in Sewanee. Alvarez’s wife, April Alvarez, serves as Associate Director of the Sewanee School of Letters, and when the couple’s son decided to move to Montana, Earling suggested they visit her Bitterroot Salish tribe’s buffalo herd. Earling contributed a journal entry on buffalo art. “Reading her essay brought tears to my eyes,” Alvarez confessed. Native Tlingit author and award-winning journalist Kate Nelson serves as the book’s editor and contributes an essay on rock art in Alaska.

“Rock art has always spoken to me,” Alvarez said. In his student days at Sewanee in the 1980s, a teacher mailed him a postcard depicting rock art in Utah. “I jumped in my car and drove there. I had to see it.”

Alvarez calls Sewanee home when he’s not on the road pursuing his passion. And he’s quick to point out, home has its own treasures. “There are paintings in Sewanee that are at least 750 years old. There was one by my house I walked by for 40 years and never saw until someone pointed it out. There are a ton of paintings on the Plateau. They’re all on the escarpment in the Warren Point sandstone.”

In his work for National Geographic photographing the 36,000-year-old cave art of Chauvet, Alvarez experienced what he describes as “being in a time machine. You don’t share anything with that artist. You don’t share culture, you don’t share language, you don’t share economies. Nothing we have ever done would enable us to conceive of their world and nothing would enable them to conceive of the world we live in, something as simple as glass or metal. And yet the paintings are beautiful and evocative. They speak to you. Time collapsed for me.”

The experience proved life changing. The National Geographic story Alvarez was working on was called “First Artists.”

“It was about why we become artists, what art does for us biologically. At the end of the art story, I didn’t want to move on. I wanted to keep working on that subject. I wanted to do something that was about humanity.”

Alvarez scaled back his National Geographic work and founded the Ancient Art Archive. The Archive preserves and shares rock art through photography, advanced 3-D modeling, interactive experiencing and educational programming. The Ancient Art Archive website showcases the archive’s work. “As the website matured, a book made sense,” Alvarez said. “A website is ephemeral. A book is permanent.”

Different from the Archive, which features rock art from all over the world, “Rock Art: An American Story” focuses on rock art in North America, from the islands of Alaska and Hawaii, through the West, Desert West, Southeast and into the Connecticut Valley of Vermont. The book’s release coincides the United States’ 250th anniversary. “Leading up to 2026, seemed like a good time to talk about the continents’ deep history,” Alvarez said. “People have flourished here for 20,000 years. We think America started 250 years ago or maybe with Columbus, but that’s just a tiny scratch of how long people have been here.”

All proceeds from the sale of “Rock Art: An American Story” go to benefit the Ancient Art Archive’s work to preserve and share the rock art experience. “We’re sending the book to all 575 federally recognized tribes, every member of congress and all governors,” Alvarez said.

“We’re 501(c)(3) nonprofit and don’t lobby for anything. We’re not trying to get people to think about what the artwork meant to the people who made it, because often times that’s not knowable,” Alvarez insisted. His hope for the book is perhaps art’s eternal question. “What is interesting to me,” Alvarez reflected, “is what the artwork tells present day people about themselves.”

“Rock Art: An American Story” is available at the Sewanee Bookstore and from the publisher Itasca Books. Go to <https://www.ancientartarchive.org/book/; for more information.

Alvarez will have a book signing from 1–3 p.m., Friday, May 1, at the Sewanee Bookstore.