Polydactyly

 During my last of many visits to the Piedras Marcadas rock art site I noticed for the first time that there are several examples of hand representations with extra fingers.  Such images are said to be common throughout the Southwest; the first time I saw an example of polydactyly was at the Three Rivers site north of Alamogordo. Feet with extra digits also appear frequently.

It is apparent from the frequency of appearance that extra fingers and toes held some special - possibly spiritual- importance to the indigenous people of the area.  The juxtaposition of a six-fingered hand with a snake figure in my picture at the Three Rivers site suggests the possibility of a link with ceremonial snake handling.

Excavated burials have shown some support for the idea that community members with polydactyly enjoyed special status such as in this article from the National Library of Medicine:

...One can speculate if these individuals might have had a special role in their society. A burial of an infant with pedal polydactyly at Tapia del Cerrito in Arizona showed indications of importance [4]. The majority of burials at this site are under room blocks or in unused rooms. Few burials contain artifacts of any value. Positioning can also be a significant. This child was buried in the central plaza in an unusual clay-lined grave, faced northeast, and was accompanied by a type of pot rare in child burials. This child had special status, but the relationship to its polydactyly is unclear. There is also a report of a high status Freemont burial of a male with polydactyly, and the bifid metatarsals at Chaco were found in a major burial with turquoise and other valuables. There is also speculation linking the Chaco individual to the male found at Sand Canyon, based upon other congenital differences and similar rich burials [6]. A familial relationship would be an important factor in documenting the location of émigrés from Chaco after the society collapsed, and it may provide us with an idea about the rulers of the Ancestral Puebloan world...

One of the things I enjoy about visiting rock art sites is that closer observation always reveals previously unnoticed details.  So, I'll be on the lookout for more examples of polydactyly in future visits.

Piedras Marcadas

 I went to the Piedras Marcadas rock art site primarily to make some pictures with one of my old Kodak folding cameras.  However, knowing I would not be able to get close to many of the panels because of the rope barriers, I also took along my little Canon digital for a bit more reach with the 4x zoom.

There is an unexcavated Pueblo not far from this site.  It is quite a way from the present course of the Rio Grande, but long ago the river wandered through the year all over the valley.

There are thousands of chiseled images on the rocks along the seventeen miles of the volcanic escarpment of the National Monument.  However many times I visit a particular site, there always seem new things to find.

Hunting for Wildflowers

 We took a morning walk through the Piedras Marcadas section of the Petroglyph National Monument.  The sky was spectacular.

The only things we found in bloom were a lot of Phacelia and one lonely Sotol plant.

Cable barriers currently prevent close access to most of the rock art panels, though a few are still visible from the trails.

On the way back to the car Margaret found a small jaw, as yet to be identified.

I did a 3-shot panorama which I stitched together in Photoshop CS2.  That worked pretty well, so I'll try more of that in the future.

Shirt Pocket Digital

Lumix Dimensions: 3.74 x 2.1 x 0.89″

I paid ten bucks for this nice little Pansonic Lumix a couple weeks ago at a yard sale.  The camera came in a box with all the documentation and a couple of cables.  It was missing a memory card and the battery charger.  The card was no problem as I had several around the house.  I found a Hong Kong seller on ebay offering the charger for $4.59, shipping included.
    The camera yields 10 megapixel images and has a pretty nice lens which is nearly as sharp as the one on my Canon Powershot and without the pincushion aberration of that one.  A full set of control features is crammed into the tiny frame.  The view screen is good sized, but something of a challenge to use in full sun.  I also found that it is very difficult to keep the camera from jiggling off the target while the zoom is extended and the camera is being held at arm's length.

Since we are planning a brief road trip to Chaco Canyon soon I decided to take the camera for a walk along the West Mesa escarpment to see how it would handle petroglyphs and their environment.

The star figures are a common motif in the rock art of the Rio Grande north of Albuquerque.  They are said to represent Venus.  Some have bodies and are carrying bows and clubs.

This is a nice time of year to visit the Petroglyph National Monument.  The temps are comfortable and there are still quite a few wildflowers like this Datura.

The petroglyphs are located at the leading edge of an ancient volcanic flow from some small volcanoes to the west of Albuquerque.  This time of year, the sharp, ragged borders of the basalt boulders are softened by cushions of blooming rabbitbrush.

Imagery

Olympic Swimmer -- Photograph: Shopland/BPI/Rex/Shutterstock (The Guardian)

Jornada style petroglyph -- Pony Hills, New Mexico

BLURB Hero

Dennis Slifer

Five of Dennis Slifer's books on Southwest rock art are listed on Amazon.  The most familiar to me is Signs of Life: Rock Art of the Upper Rio Grande. I think I acquired the book soon after it was published in 1998, and it has served as an indispensable guide to my own explorations of the subject since that time.  Slifer was a geologist working with the New Mexico Environment Department when he produced the book.  His scientific background coupled with unflagging enthusiasm gives his rock art work an unmatched quality of authority as well as a high level of artistry thanks to his talents for writing, drawing and photography.

I discovered only recently that since retiring in 2007 Slifer has self-published thirteen books using BLURB.  As Slifer says:

... With the advent of self-publishing software and print-on-demand books I am now empowered to produce a book about rock art for myself, free of the demands of publishers, reviewers, editors and marketing directors.

In Slifer's BLURB collection, the one that immediately caught my eye was Art on the Rocks: The Best of the Quest.  The book is 224 pages in length and features photographs of the author's favorite rock art sites made over a period of thirty years.  Given the length and quality of the book the hardcover price of $87.99 is unsurprising, if a bit daunting.  Slifer's on line preview of the book on BLURB generously displays all the photos.  With the selection of the full-screen option the preview text is a bit small for comfort, but still readable.

Western Lands

The Four Corners region including southeast Utah contains examples of ancient art that rivals that found anywhere else in the world.

Horseshoe Canyon -- Wikipedia

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has been touring the area and speaking with groups including environmental and tribal groups asking for protection of 1.9 million acres in the Bears Ears area through designation of the area as a National Monument.  It is estimated that the region contains around 100,000 archaeological sites which are largely unprotected and currently subject to looting, vandalism and grave robbing.

Representative Rob Bishop (R-UT) has introduced a bill which would transfer all federally-owned energy and mineral resources in southern Utah to state control to allow development of coal, oil and uranium resources.  The bill would also open access to Recapture Canyon to motorized vehicles.

A good over-view of the area and proposals for protection are available at The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition web site.

Rock Art Resources

Chaco Canyon

BOOKS
(Titles link to Amazon.  Used copies are often available at a fraction of the original cover price.)

Handbook of Rock Art Research, David S. Whitley,Editor
A comprehensive overview of current rock art research methodology and theoretical approaches incorporating new carbon dating techniques, relevant ethnographic accounts and links to neuropsycological investigations.

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, David Lewis-Williams
The shamanic and vision quest origins of rock art from a neuropsychological perspective.

Images in Stone, David Muench and Polly Schaafsma, 1995
Astonishing photographic images by Muench of rock art sites in the Western United States with a text by Polly Schaafsma.

Rock Art of the American Southwest, Fred Hirschman and Scott Thybony, 1994
Very fine large-format photography by Fred Hirschman.

A Field Guide to Rock Art Symbols of the Greater Southwest, Alex Patterson, 1992
A catalog of rock art symbols with suggestions for interpretation.

Rock Art in New Mexico, Polly Schaafsma, 1992
A well-illustrated over-view of the region by a scholar.

Signs of Life: Rock Art of the Upper Rio Grande, Dennis Slifer, 1998
A practical guidebook to publicly-accessible rock art sites.

---

Piedras Marcadas

ON LINE LINKS

Rock Art postings on my blogs:

• Photography and Vintage Cameras
• Everything Else

* * *  

Gambler's House
Chaco Canyon, Its World, and Ours. A blog, mostly about ancient Puebloan cultures. There are numerous articles on the topic of Rock Art.

Flickr Rock Art Group
A large catalog of rock art photographs, mostly from the Southwest U.S.

Rock Art Southwest
New Mexico rock art sites portrayed by Santa Fe graphic designer and photographer, Gary Cascio.

Turing instabilities in biology, culture, and consciousness? On the enactive origins of symbolic material culture.  A paper about the origins of geometric rock art designs in the structures and functions of the human brain.

a tell

I became seriously interested in Native American rock art when we lived in a remote desert home in southern New Mexico.  Our house was not far from the mouth of Broad Canyon beside the Rio Grande.  All of the rock art examples I found in the canyon were petroglyph designs, created by incising or pecking of smooth rock surfaces.  In near-by canyons to the south there were also a few ancient painted designs which are called pictographs.  It seemed to me to be an extraordinary opportunity to make a connection with indigenous artists, probably shamans in many cases, who had left traces of their cultures dating back centuries.  While the Broad Canyon examples did not display the grandeur and sophistication of those to the north in places like Barrier Canyon, they nevertheless showed a good grasp of design principles.  Broad Canyon petroglyphs often were continuations of themes and designs which persisted for millennia, and were clearly related to indigenous cultures throughout the Southwest, and as far distant as Central America.

It came as something of a shock to me when I first heard someone express the idea that Native American rock art was simply graffiti.  I was at first tempted to write off such a judgment as simple ignorance, which after all is a correctable condition.  Subsequent encounters with such derogatory expressions, however, convinced me that something more nefarious was at play; the denigration of the ancient art was really a signal or gesture which betrayed an underlying attitude, rather similar to a poker player's tell which inadvertently reveals the player's hand or intention.  Such judgments, often asserted rather aggressively, are really just expressions of underlying patterns of racism and xenophobia.  The implications of  such critical derision is that Native American rock art and likely other examples throughout the world was the casual production of slackers incapable of producing real Art.  I've been inclined a few times to offer some historic facts in rebuttal, as well as mentioning the rather wide range of artistic values in actual modern graffiti, but I think it is pretty much a waste of time to try to maintain a dialogue in the face of willful ignorance.

An interesting and persistent variation on the theme of rock art as graffiti is the belief that the ancient designs were produced by someone other than Native Americans.  Here is a passage from Discovering North American Rock Art (quoting Steward from 1937) which pretty well sums up the loopy wing of rock art interpreters:

... Popular fancy musters petroglyphs in support of theories abandoned by science half a century ago.  It offers them as proof that Egyptians, Scythians, Chinese, and a host of other Old World peoples, including the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, whose fate continues to have absorbing interest to many persons, invaded America in ancient days.  It claims them to be markers of buried treasures, signs of ancient astrology, records of vanished races, symbols of diabolical cults, works of the hand of God, and a hundred other things conceived by feverish brains...

 The chapter authors,  Hyder and Loendorf, go on to note that:

Sixty and more years after noted anthropologist and archaeologist Julian Steward made this statement, we would need to add  only aliens from outer space for Steward's assessment to remain true...

I would add that is seems rather likely that a substantial portion of the Lost Tribes theorists are contiguous with those who would have dinosaurs and cave-dwelling humans living in the same era.  Perhaps the tell might be extended even a trifle further to include the fervid supporters of a Trump presidency.

Chaco 2004

The sun announces
The longest day for each year
At Fajada Butte.

Fajada Butte rises up out of the Chacra Mesa about a mile south of the Una Vida great house.  Near the top of the butte is an archaeoastronomical feature known as the "Sun Dagger". The Anasazi carved a spiral there on a rock face on which shafts of sunlight appear at midday to mark the solstices and equinoxes.

---

Windows to windows,
Doorways to infinity :
A world of mirrors.

Pueblo Bonito is the largest of the Anasazi great houses.  The multi-story complex was built in stages over a 300-year period beginning in about the year 850 A.D. Windows and doorways are frequently aligned in a way that emphasizes a receding perspective similar to what one sees in opposing mirror surfaces.
    Without roofs and surface plastering, the buildings appear much different from when they were in use a thousand years ago. While the structure is revealed in a way that would not have been apparent to Chacoans, the effects of lighting and ceremonial associations can only be guessed at.

---

One path sets the choice :
Up to Pueblo Alto, or
Down to Kin Kletso ?

 

Agility and stamina are required to negotiate the trail between the great house of Kin Kletso in the canyon bottom to that of Pueblo Alto high on the mesa above.  Topography is a preeminent shaper of world view for people who do all their traveling on foot. The Anasazi, however, did have an awareness of a world extending far from Chaco Canyon.
    This trail starts in a crack in the canyon wall, then leads to a thirty-foot-wide roadway which extended many miles to the north. It was just one of many such roads radiating out of Chaco Canyon. Precious ceremonial objects and raw materials traveled to Chaco from deep in the interior of what is now Mexico, and from as far west as the Pacific coast. Religious and political traditions traveled over the same pathways.

---

Tlaloc, the Rain God,
Sometimes dons strange disguise
To walk among us.

This representation of the Rain God is distinctly ornate with its spiral eyes and lace-like decoration. Square-headed, goggle-eyed figures are carved on rock surfaces all along the upper Rio Grande and near-by watersheds.   The origins of the figure can be traced to Central America, but little can be deduced from Anasazi-era representations other than the fact that it was of great importance.

---

Low doorways expose
The neck of the enemy
At Chetro Ketl. 

No great house doorway permits upright entry other than to a single person with the stature of a small child.  Was this enforced obeisance for the faithful, a defensive measure, or did it serve some other symbolic or ceremonial purpose?   There seems no way to be certain now.

---

Beneath an overhang,
A record of a supernova –
The swallows don't care.

The massive explosion of a star created the Crab Nebula in the year 1054.  This red painted pictograph may portray the cataclysmic stellar event in the Taurus constellation, but gives no hint as to how it was interpreted by Anasazi astronomers.

Picturing Time

I snapped this shot on a recent visit to the El Morro National Monument in northwest New Mexico:

When I was back home the next day, I found in a quick web search that Alexander Gardner had made a picture while standing at nearly the same spot in 1868:

Wikipedia -- Photo by Alexander Gardner

Aside from the coincidence, the really interesting thing in comparing the two images is the difference in the vegetation.

The oasis at El Morro was used by many cultures over a period of centuries, so it is possible that the surroundings were denuded of trees by people's needs for wood for construction and fire making.  It is also conceivable that the management of the runoff from the cliffs and protection of the surroundings have allowed new growth without precedent.  Hard to say for sure.

Here are a few more shots made on our last visit to the site:

We stayed the night about a mile down the road from El Morro at a charming little cabin behind the Ancient Way Cafe:

The El Morro site is also know as Inscription Rock due to the many ancient petroglyphs and more recent graffiti which adorn the sandstone cliffs.  The light on this visit was not conducive to making images of the rock art, but I did get some pictures of it on a previous visit: