On Palm Sunday I included in my sermon my story of the Cooper Site and the red lightning bolt painted on the skull of a bison.  This is the oldest work of pained art in North America, around 10,000 years old.  I first learned of the find and visited the site in 2007.  The skull itself is at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Norman.

That week, while working on the sermon, I was googling to find out more and discovered the book by the lead archaeologist.  I ordered it and have begun reading it.  The Foreward by Solveig Turpin adds to the spiritual and theological reflection of the lightning bolt:

The lighntning bolt blazened on the bleached and dried bone of an earlier kills is a talisman that has ethnographic analogs among the more recent Plains dwellers who use magic to lure bison to their death.  Red ochre, the paint of choice, has magic connotations; bones are essential elements in resurrection themes in hunting and gathering belief systems of the present and the past; and geometric signs are often a symbolic representation of trance, another basic principle in animistic religions.  This simple design gains meaning from its context, which in turn legitimizes the concept of hunting magic and its role in economic and social success.