Leigh Marymor
Leigh Marymor is a Past President of the American Rock Art Research Association where he has been a member for over 40 years and also served several terms during that time as Chairperson of the ARARA's Conservation Committee. Leigh has been awarded the following recognitions by the American Rock Art Research Association: Castleton Award for excellence in research (2002); Conservation and Preservation Award for the activities of the Bay Area Rock Art Research Association on behalf of cultural resource heritage protection (2008); and the Wellmann Award for lifetime achievement in the fields of rock art studies, documentation, education, conservation and outreach (2021). He co-founded the Bay Area Rock Art Research Association, along with Dr. Paul Freeman in 1983, and continues in a leadership role in that organization today.
Leigh Marymor is the Compiler of Rock Art Studies: A Bibliographic Database. The RASBdb project is a searchable bibliographic database of the World's rock art literature and contains more than 55,300 citations as of January 2026. The RASBdb was hosted as a joint project between the Bancroft Library (University of California - Berkeley) and the Bay Area Rock Art Research Association (BARARA) from 2003 - 2016. In fall of 2016, BARARA affiliated with the Museum of Northern Arizona to continue the free and open access to the RASBdb project. The Rock Art Studies Bibliographic Database search engine at the Museum of Northern Arizona is located at:
https://musnaz.org/search_rock_art_studies_db/.
Robert Bednarik, Convener of the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations has called the RASBdb project ". . . an incredibly useful, valuable, and effective resource for the 9000 or so rock art researchers of the world."
Jean Clottes, General Inspector for Archaeology, French Ministry of Culture (retired), comments, ". . . his best and most useful achievement is creating "Rock Art Studies: A Bibliographic Database . . . which is used by all rock art researchers the world over."
Dario Seglie, Liason Officer, IFRAO - UNESCO – ICOM is enthusiastic about the RASBdb, "My felicitations for your extraordinary work! This is of great interest for the scholars, student[s], institutions and museums working on Rock Art."
Leigh Marymor is a Research Affiliate at the Museum of Northern Arizona. He holds a B.S. degree in Community Education, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, he is a trained textile artist, and retired in 2021 as President of The Lunt Marymor Company, a construction firm located in the San Francisco Bay Area specializing in plumbing, radiant heating, and fire sprinkler design and installations.
Leigh Marymor is the Compiler of Rock Art Studies: A Bibliographic Database. The RASBdb project is a searchable bibliographic database of the World's rock art literature and contains more than 55,300 citations as of January 2026. The RASBdb was hosted as a joint project between the Bancroft Library (University of California - Berkeley) and the Bay Area Rock Art Research Association (BARARA) from 2003 - 2016. In fall of 2016, BARARA affiliated with the Museum of Northern Arizona to continue the free and open access to the RASBdb project. The Rock Art Studies Bibliographic Database search engine at the Museum of Northern Arizona is located at:
https://musnaz.org/search_rock_art_studies_db/.
Robert Bednarik, Convener of the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations has called the RASBdb project ". . . an incredibly useful, valuable, and effective resource for the 9000 or so rock art researchers of the world."
Jean Clottes, General Inspector for Archaeology, French Ministry of Culture (retired), comments, ". . . his best and most useful achievement is creating "Rock Art Studies: A Bibliographic Database . . . which is used by all rock art researchers the world over."
Dario Seglie, Liason Officer, IFRAO - UNESCO – ICOM is enthusiastic about the RASBdb, "My felicitations for your extraordinary work! This is of great interest for the scholars, student[s], institutions and museums working on Rock Art."
Leigh Marymor is a Research Affiliate at the Museum of Northern Arizona. He holds a B.S. degree in Community Education, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, he is a trained textile artist, and retired in 2021 as President of The Lunt Marymor Company, a construction firm located in the San Francisco Bay Area specializing in plumbing, radiant heating, and fire sprinkler design and installations.
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Colorado, rock engraving panel, previously classified
as a Western Message Petroglyph (WMP) site. Drawing on
recent image analysis and the application of Blissymbolics—
a mid-20th century symbolic writing system—the report
reclassifies the Cameo panel as a non-WMP artifact. This
finding reduces the WMP site count to 40 and underscores
the role of digital tools and cross-disciplinary research in refining
archaeological classification.
Papers by Leigh Marymor
fine grained analysis of the Western Message Petroglyph (WMP) texts themselves, listening for the author’s voice, as it were, in hopes of revealing patterns and themes that reveal something of the WMP author’s sensibility. Do we find similar evidence that
supports common authorship among the 39 WMP sites reflected in a unity of narrative style and themes that we see reflected in their patterned landscape contexts and image content? In this phase of the investigation, I attempt to accomplish something more than
simply projecting my own voice into this material, as its translator, although there is certainly an inescapable measure of that. The translator walks a narrow line between faithfulness to something original and artfulness in creating something new."
study for more than a century. Some of the earliest research was
done as part of a large-scale scientific archaeological expedition
from the University of California, but other recordings were done
by avocationalists who were intrigued with the many carvings and
paintings lining the cliff faces along the Columbia River. Of course,
some early avocationalists’ studies are little more than flights of
fancy, trying to attribute the rock art to marauding Viking warriors
or Indian sun-worshippers, but several avocationalists left records
that remain the basis for twenty-first century research projects.
Here, we summarize the history of research into Columbia Plateau
rock art and present it as a matrix organizing the hundreds of
references provided herein.
classically situated and classically engraved. The site is located at the base of the Sierra escarpment, on a rise that overlooks the Owens valley to the east. In the foreground is the northern branch of the historic Midland Trail from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, now overlaid by Interstate 395. In the far view lay the old right-of-way of the Carson and Colorado narrow gauge railroad that served the mining interests at Keeler on the east edge of the valley. . . ."