Rock art, an essentially pan-global phenomenon, is one of the great cultural achievements of our early ancestors. Testifying to humankind's imagination and creativity, it constitutes a striking visual aspect of our collective patrimony. Believed to have originated some 40,000-50,000 years ago with Cro-Magnon man, the immediate ancestor of fully modern humans, rock art reflects the beginnings of "our artistic sensibility, of the basic human impulse to communicate, to create, to depict, to influence the course of life" (Clottes 2002:3).

With the exception of Antarctica, where no rock art is found, a preliminary survey from all other continents has shown that "about 70,000 sites of rock paintings and engravings are known throughout the world, with an estimated 45 million images and signs on record" (Anati 2004:2). However, these estimates may be far too conservative considering that Arizona alone houses approximately 6,000 to 8,000 sites. Many of these are of "world-class" quality and are an integral part of the rock art theater of the American Southwest, an area that ranks as one of the great epicenters of paleoart in the world.

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