Sonin, Bill, 1939-1993

Biography

In November 1993, Bill Sonin of Berkeley, Calif. passed away, and unknown to his fellow avocational and professional rock art researchers, left an extraordinary corpus of material relating to the rock art of California and the surrounding area. A Volkswagon mechanic and computer hardware repairman, he became fascinated with rock art studies during the last ten years of his life.

Sonin began compiling this list as an update on Heizer and Clewlow, but the number of new sites exceeded their original 400. In 1995, the computerized document was published, just as he had left it on his computer, as California Rock Art -- An Annotated Site Inventory and Bibliography . It was edited by Leigh Marymor and published as Occasional Papers, Volume 17, of the Rock Art Archive of the Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area Rock Art Research Association. The Bay Area Rock Art Research Association was asked to catalog his library and research papers and to procure an archival home for the collection. Only as BARARA members reviewed the plethora of correspondence, notes, research papers-in-progress, photographs and articles, plus over 57 assorted binders of rock art site information for each county in the state did the magnitude of his work begin to be revealed. A search of his computer files revealed a computerized database of a 1300 page annotated site inventory and bibliography of rock art sites in California. Sonin's note books were filled with site reports, research notes, and cut-and-pasted documentation of all references he was able to glean for each trinomial.

In addition to the extensive information available on sites, the collection also contains separate files on other topics such as cupules, baby rocks, PCN's western message sites, ground figures, the Southwest, and questions he wanted to pose to researchers and many personal notations.

[extracted from Gray Literature Roundtable, presented at the 1997 SCA meeting in Rohnert Park, Calif., by Donna L. Gillette]

From the guide to the Bill Sonin Papers, 1983-1993, (The Bancroft Library.)