randall henderson petroglyphs - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

tions have been ascribed to various
Indian tribes. But prehistoric rock art
remains a mystery. And yet, these
professionally neglected markings
pecked and painted on the walls of
caves and canyons might some day
provide the key to the origin of
America's "native" people, as the
Rosetta Stone solved mysteries of prehistory
in Egypt.
For want of a better term, this article
will refer generally to prehistoric
rock art as "petrography." More
specifically, we use the term "pictograph"
in reference to subjects painted
onto walls of caves or protected
canyons and "petroglyph" is the proper
term applied to markings which
were pecked, or incised, by aborigines
into rock walls with stone tools. Thus,
both sculptors and painters are represented
in our prehistoric gallery.
Petrography, however, is not exclusively
an old American custom. The
Altamira caves of Spain, discovered
in 1879 but not recognized as authentic
until 1903, upset all previous ideas
of man's pre-ice age development.
On its walls were found beautifully
rendered yellow, brown, red and
black painting of mammoth bison,
wild boar, horses, cave bear and other
extinct animals sketched by n n
some 20 or 30 thousand years agu
Similar subjects were fount! \nn
trayed in caves of France. A fi nun
especially prevalent in bot!> hiru
pean and American prehis' >rii mi
A primitive Michelangelo caived unit tht
above ground near Vernal, Utah '/.v cl.i
is the imprint or likeness of human
hands. Certain prehistorians interpret
these as symbolic of man's power
over beast, while others suggest that
the prints were used as signatures to
show the number of individuals occupying
a particular campsite, like a
hotel register. They also could have
been printed as a part of a ceremony
initiating participants into certain
mystic rites which took place among
primitive peoples everywhere.
Throughout northern Europe and
northern Asia, early man left his
mark on sunlit walls as well as in
dark caverns. Petroglyphs are incised
on horizontal planes of cliffs along
the Russian shores of Lake Onega
where stylized representations of elk,
reindeer, whales, fish, birds, wheellike
suns and all kinds of magic symbols,
with a few human figures, were
discovered in 1848. Similar petroglyphs
later turned up in Sweden,
Norway, in the Urals, on the shores
of the White Sea, and along the upper
course of the Yenisei River.
Among the most famous of prehistoric
art work is that created by
pigmy Bushmen in crevices of rocks
in South Africa where they recorded
active scenes depicting elephants,
rhinoceroses, lions, zebras and giraffes.
Other African petroglyphs,
which precede the relatively recent
Bushman engravings, may be the oldest
surviving art in the world.
Aboriginal Australian sites are ex-
tensive where red and white earthcolors
depict animals, footprints and
abstract signs in calcareous rock —
and, again, hand prints. Although
to our knowledge no systematic recording
has been instituted, petrography
is also known to occur in Carribean
areas, Central and South
America and Mexico. It is interesting
to note that it has not been reported
in areas occupied by Eskimos,
other than the Kodiac Islands.
Closer to home, outstanding pictographs
were discovered in a cave of
the San Baltazan Mountains of Baja
California near Mulege in 1929 and
in 1962 famous mystery writer and
explorer Erie Stanley Gardner discovered
similar paintings in other
Baja caves which he described in his
book, The Hidden Heart of Baja.
These interested arclieologists because
they represented a higher culture than
had previously been ascribed to aborigines
of Baja and, depicting enormously
tall people painted half red and
half black, exhibited a style unlike
any cavepainting known elsewhere.
How could a highly developed culture
begin and end within this limited
environ? Most likely it did not.
Future exploration will turn up
somewhere, someplace, paintings of
red and black striped people and a
mystery will be solved.
In the United States, ancient petrography
has been reported in all but
nine states, although the greatest
painted these figures working from a \4-inch ledge on the face of a cliff \00-feet
igure represents the "Sun Carrier" and is probably the finest example of Indian
petrography in the United States.