Ep. 27: Messages From the Past - The Rock Art of the American West | The American West

A tangible and fascinating landscape record of the human past in the West exists in a form barely found elsewhere in America. So-called rock art, images incised and painted on rock faces, still reach out of the past to connect us with the thoughts, dreams, gods, and myths of ancient America. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:04Speaker 02

  Found almost exclusively in America in the western half of the continent, the West rock art remains an enigmatic record of thousands of years of the human presence here. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Messages from the past: The Rock Art of the American West.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  For Europeans and Americans journeying into the West in the 19th century, the region past the center line of the continent was plains and mountains, deserts and seacoasts, people and animals. And for them, the whole stood as the purest, most distilled version of John Locke's famous line, "In the beginning, all the world was America." For old-worlders, the West loomed as a planetary touchstone of everything that was wild and new. All the West seemed freshly made, a high-drama country awaiting a high-drama destiny.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  But for a good corrective to that kind of colonial nearsightedness, sometime in your life, do this: drive across the remote San Rafael Swell country of southern Utah to a detached piece of Canyonlands National Park. Follow the signs into a particular canyon of the many thousands of beautiful slick rock erosional cuts in the American West, then stroll along under shimmering cotton woods a little more than three miles until you come to a particular sandstone alcove. There, in a grand wildlands of stone, sand, and blue sky, is a mural that will at once

• 3:08Speaker 02

  silence all thoughts about how untouched America was when Europe stumbled onto it. The Great Gallery, the name by which we know the round-shouldered, armless, enigmatic, ghostly beings that decorate this sandstone alcove, seems to possess the odd and rare ability to pull gobsmacked visitors out of the present and into a different time, a different continent. The Great Gallery's humanoid figures stretch across sixty feet of vertical slick rock. They await the modern gaze in adornments of gauzy red and snowy white. Most figures are as tall as you are.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Many are solidly colored, others are festooned with snakes and torso designs like tattoos. But it's the gallery's reigning protagonist, appearing in a cluster of figures on the wall's left margin, who quickly draws every looker's attention. There are other figures, almost as large, but this sort of humanoid, sometimes called "The Holy Ghost," with a lightbulb head, glowing eye sockets, and geometric body patterning, is the only figure who appears surrounded by a robed retinue. The Holy Ghost consorts are painted with red hematite, and the ancient artists who

• 4:36Speaker 02

  rendered the scene portray them in various sizes to create the 3D effect of a powerful king, or maybe a god, trailing followers at every remove of distance, and perhaps of time.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  So, the American West was a new, undiscovered part of the world when we old-worlders found it, yes? Maybe that assumption needs a reset. Archaeologists estimate the painted images of the Great Gallery are between 2,000 and 4,000 years old. Its artists, or more likely, artists, were archaic, around earlier than the Anasazi, the so-called "old ones" of the southwest. Ancient Rome may not have yet begun dominating Europe and Africa when the Great Gallery appeared in this canyon. England and France were millennia from becoming nation-states.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  In 2026, the United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary as a nation. The people who painted "The Glowing-Eyed Being and His Companions" in the Great Gallery were here eight to 16 times farther back in America's past. If the West can be said to possess several grand mythologies, one of them, its "deep-time" human story, is exemplified by the Great Gallery and thousands of other pictographs and petroglyphs across the West. These surviving ancient portrayals of the human presence are their own evidence of

• 6:16Speaker 02

  a mythological time: art and graffiti on enduring rock reaching out of the deep past down to us. "We were here," the West rock art says. "There were people right here, and so very long ago, you can't fathom such a passage of time, nor did we ever imagine your existence. But what we left for you is the still-visible proof of how mind and consciousness have long expressed themselves."

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Today, we're reasonably certain that coyote stories, the West's oldest literature, extend centuries back into the dimness of American time. Coyote was a Paleolithic god, so some coyote stories may be 10,000 years old. The hundreds of thousands of rock art images painted on or incised or pecked into rocks are the visual analogy to the West's coyote stories. Efforts to date some of them indicate that there is Western rock art that legitimately reaches 8,000 years into the American past. Rock art is a catch-all term for what the study of these images categorizes as pictographs

• 7:34Speaker 02

  and others called petroglyphs. The Holy Ghost and his companions in the Great Gallery are pictographs, figures native artisans painted onto rock walls in a variety of colors, reds, yellows, and blues, made from local natural resources. Petroglyphs, on the other hand, are images that long-deceased Western inhabitants either carved into rock with knives or pounded onto rock surfaces with stone, hammers, and chisels. As an artifact of the American presence, rock art is scattered in most suitable locations everywhere we humans have tried, which is to say, all over the planet.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  In 2026, the oldest rock art that science has so far found is a human handprint on an Indonesian island that's been dated to 67,800 years before our own present moment in time. In North America, there are still a small handful of rock art sites east of the Mississippi, but by many times over, the greatest number of such sites in the US are in the West. The West's widespread rock art is yet another trait that makes it exceptional among American regions.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  I once had a yellow cat I named Kerouac. He was a cool cat who forever pawed at the keyboard of my laptop. Probably he was jealous that I paid the keys and mousepad so much attention, but watching him, I convinced myself he was puzzling over what possible role something like a keyboard was playing in the world he and I shared. Animal science has now taught us that neither self-awareness nor handed-down culture sets us much apart from our fellow animals beyond our obvious cleverness in refining those two traits. But is there another species out there that tries to explain the world?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  To be a human animal is to wonder at things beyond our kin. Because we've long tried to manipulate nature to make our lives better, we're the animal that tries to figure out how things work and the animal that tells stories to illuminate our insights. Maybe Kerouac really was puzzling over what a keyboard meant. Most likely not. We humans, on the other hand, witness something inexplicable and do our best to tease out its meaning and role. There are many aspects of a human story that elicit the puzzlement I used to assign to my cat Kerouac. Coming face-to-face with the internal lives

• 10:26Speaker 02

  of people who existed in past realities as one of them, and it's a powerful one. Once for a few weeks, I got to read the thoughts Thomas Jefferson put down on yellowed parchment, written in his own hand on one page with a thumb smudge from some all-too-human accident still visible. Back when the authorities still let you do it, I once stood atop the Mayan sacred pyramid Kukulkan in the ancient city of Chichen Itza, wheezing from the climb but euphoric at the human impulse to construct a monumental shrine to the morning star.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  On a wise big island, I've knelt silently before a black lava rock sculpture, a Heow shrine to the goddess Pele that Kamehameha I had built prior to attempting the unification of all the islands. In all these places, I felt an absolute connection with minds like my own, with ideas we'd call vision or ambition. It's the same feeling I've had time and time again investigating rock art sites across much of the American West. Like my cat, I may not understand their function or their messages, but the human intent to leave something to the future is universal and unmistakable, and I do at least get that.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  And in fact, some of the most powerful connections I've ever felt to the human continuum have come from simply standing awestruck before the imagery laid down by the West's ancient inhabitants. Rock art as a name for these images is a term some modern native people don't favor, largely because they don't consider the imagery to be art. Whatever it's called, it's found everywhere in the West. There's exposed rock, from the Great Plains to California, from the Northern Rockies to the Southwest. But very much like the great Pleistocene bestiaries painted on the walls of limestone

• 12:34Speaker 02

  caves in Western Europe between 12,000 and 35,000 years ago, Western rock art imagery can seem inscrutable. It regularly forces us to grapple with cultural value systems unfamiliar to us, human symbols we struggle to make sense of. Confronted with strange emblems of a world we assume we know, what we're really being fussy about is having to admit just how optional are our own precious beliefs. We humans might be the same animals everywhere, but our cultures are like computer software, the number of which can seem infinite.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  A Montana hunter-gatherer of 5,000 years ago might strike us as odd with explanations of how the world works, why things happen, as willfully strange. But with compassion and imagination, it's usually possible to see that behind the cultural wrapping, there's another human being we recognize. That's the way you have to approach rock imagery, because no other elements from the ancient American past provides this kind of intimacy with the people who were here hundreds or thousands of years ago. Flint tools like points or scrapers, pieces of pottery, fragments of woven sandals or

• 13:58Speaker 02

  baskets, were, in a sense, all tools, objects of utility and economy. But images are the way our minds symbolize the world. When you stand wonderingly in front of Utah's Great Gallery, you're getting to peer into the minds of the ancients and catch a glimpse of how they interpreted and thought about the cosmos and how it worked. Most Westerners have favorite rock art sites, but before proceeding to a few of my own, I ought to at least mention theories of meaning, as well as techniques for dating some of these sites. Rock art is notoriously difficult to date, but there are ways to determine a site's age.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Subject matter is one obvious one. If the imagery features guns, or horse-mounted warriors, or other post-contact scenes, it's obviously only 400 years old at most. Many older sites are covered to various depths by desert varnish, iron and manganese oxides produced by biotic activity. Varnished lamination atop of sites' images can sometimes be dated. In less-exposed locales, the age of calcium carbonate deposits that form over artwork is dateable with a technique called uranium series analysis.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Researchers haven't necessarily used these approaches extensively in the West, but in a few select sites, they've yielded some very old dates. Not Clovis or Folsom old, but 8,000 years old and more.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  As for theories about the intentionality of rock art, they range from the utilitarian to some version of the spiritual pilgrimage. Garrick Mallory, researcher with the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology a century ago, famously argued for the literal. He believed that rock art images were a native form of writing, similar to the glyph inscriptions of the Mayans. Today, a pretty vanishingly small minority of researchers follow Mallory. Top scholars like Polly Schaffsma, who's written extensively on the rock art of the Southwest, are more apt to argue meaning on a site-by-site basis.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Like painted buffalo robes and the so-called ledger paintings done by Plains people in the late 1800s, some rock art is autobiographical. It can even recount historical events. Other sites may constitute territorial markers or clan-specific images. Existing Indian peoples, who almost always know the rock art sites in their country and sometimes still use them for ceremonial and religious purposes, reject many of the non-native interpretations out of hand. In fact, some groups, like the Shoshones and Crowes on the peripheries of Wyoming's Bighorn Basin,

• 17:08Speaker 02

  a major site of a kind of rock art often called "den-woody", argue that it was not their human ancestors at all who painted or carved the images in their country. In their traditions, rock art was the work of spirit beings, supernaturals. In this view, the images are not, in the modern sense of such things, historical or territorial or clan-derived, and they certainly are not art. The images are religious. They recount the look of spiritual adventure travel.

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• 20:06Speaker 02

  Now, beyond being awestruck at the cosmos, and at the existence and intricacies of life itself, I'm not religious. I like to science the shit out of my explanations. So with all respect for the power religious explanations have for many people, the scientific method does indicate that the chances of genuine supernatural activity having produced the West's rock art literally, is vanishingly remote. That however, doesn't mean that a large percentage of rock art isn't deeply religious in nature. In fact, the prevailing opinion among trained archaeologists these days is that shamans may have executed

• 20:50Speaker 02

  much of the rock imagery in the West. If that's true, and I suspect it is, I like to fall back on the Scandinavian anthropologist Achille Holcrance's definition of a shaman. "The shaman," Holcrance once wrote, "is a social functionary who, with the help of guardian spirits, attains ecstasy in order to create a rapport with the supernatural world on behalf of his group members." Shamans achieve their ecstasy in a variety of ways. Sometimes through fasting, sometimes through repetition or rhythmic movement,

• 21:33Speaker 02

  sometimes through the use of psychoactive drugs. These kinds of stressful physical ordeals sometimes were initiation or ceremonial rites. Sometimes, a result of them was to record mental images of the experiences induced, perhaps to invoke supernatural beings in a spirit world to take interest and intervene in human affairs. What we may have in many rock art image sites, in other words, are representations of vision states or of a religious condition of rapture.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Because some of the particular details seen in rock images appear worldwide. For a good many years now, there have been experts who think that some designs that appear in petroglyphs and pictographs are endemic to the hardwiring of the human brain and nervous system. In altered states, and readers who, like me, are children of the 60s and 70s, may recall this rather well, the brain tends to see geometric patterns or cascades of dots, swirling spirals, which science tells us are called phosphines.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Brain-created patterns you can sometimes see behind eyelids by closing your eyes tightly. Hallucinogens, like the cactus peyote used in ceremonies of the Native American Church, can induce them, as well as a sense of the self leaving the physical body and flying off to parallel worlds where the physical body can't go. I stand as a witness, at least, to the phosphine effect. Once, sitting cross-legged in the sand on the banks of the Rio Grande in Transpacos, Texas, four or five fresh peyotes into the experience, I watched in wonder as an endless

• 23:33Speaker 02

  stream of geometric designs swept over me from behind, then disappeared into the far distance in front. It was an astonishing display that put me in mind of Mesoamerican wall freezes and art. Only later did I realize that my eyes had been shut the whole time. For those who remember the 70s, these flights became the vehicle for the teachings of an anthropologist-turned-writer named Carlos Castaneda, who, in a flotilla of wildly successful pop anthropology books, created a Yaqui Indian shaman named Don Juan.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Anthropologists doing more serious work have subjected the Paleolithic cave images of Europe to this shaman analysis with success. And in the American West, they've done the same with the famous pictographs of the Lower Pecos River in Texas, and with the Big Horn Basin's Dinwiddie images, and some of the petroglyphs of California.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  The near-life-sized Dinwiddie images, pecked petroglyphs the experts assume are from the deep Shoshonean inhabitation of this part of the West, are the most prevalent on the western edge of the Bighorn Basin. In places like the legend rock art site, the Thermopolis area, or in the canyons exiting the eastern flanks of the Wind River Range, the Dinwiddie figures are absolute showstoppers. The imagery appears to show humans, but humans merged with other animals, the term of art for which is therianthrop. Dinwiddie humanoids often have the clawed feet of birds.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Sometimes the hands are also clawed, and the figures frequently have wings. In Dinwiddie sites, and this is also true of images like the White Shaman along the Lower Pecos in Texas, the figures' arms are often in the classic shaman position, raised overhead and held wide as if welcoming visions, or maybe launching into flight on journeys to the world of the supernaturals. Or perhaps, raised and held wide to radiate power, to control nature or animals, to make things happen in the ordinary world of the living.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  The Dinwiddie shamanic tradition seems to have first appeared on the rock faces of the Bighorn Basin 6,800 years ago. And some of the figures may be barely more than a century old. That's a very long representation of a form of artfulness and shamanic tradition. Another culture's rock art I've been privileged to walk among many times is that of the ancestral pueblos and their pueblo descendants, which decorates the lava cliffs and dikes that surround me where I now live in New Mexico.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  A National Park Service unit called Petroglyph National Monument preserves thousands of the images the pueblos long ago pecked into the black cliffs along the Rio Grande on the west edge of Albuquerque. Climbing its trails to pick your way through white-lined images on black boulders, Petroglyph National Monument has sometimes given me a Sistine Chapel feeling, at other times, the open-mouthed reaction one has on the Las Vegas Strip. There are elaborately costume Kachina deities on these rocks, god messengers the Pueblos still reenact in their ceremonies.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Having once stood in freezing December weather in Zuni Pueblo and watched a towering shalaco Kachina plucking its two-foot wooden beak while dancing a solstice blessing inside a new home. It's hard for me to separate the sacred from the entertaining in the rock art representations of such beings. I also can't help imagining young native couples wandering through here on date nights a thousand years ago, holding hands under a full moon as white outlined visions leaped out from the silvery black.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Such images from the ancients tend to be stylized, sometimes seemingly chaotic, often recognizable but pushed in what appears outrageous directions. In a word, they're abstract. They're exactly the inspiration that led 20th century painters like Pablo Picasso and Yoan Miro to develop modern art. Pueblo imagery here and elsewhere is mind-bending in variety and detail. There are mythical creatures like giant horned water serpents, but also real rattlesnakes, often two in tandem. There are thunderbird eagles, badgers, coyotes, bears, all revered animals the Pueblos preserved.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  There are gleaming four-pointed planets, parades of priests, sometimes all with erections, an endless variety of different cloud terraces, the home of the cochinas. Those appear in conjunction with water serpents, mountain lions, sometimes a woman's nether parts. There are faces with or without masks, handprints, lengthy zigzag lines, spirals, fields of dots, warrior figures protected by circular shields. Petroglyph monument preserves a particularly well-done Central American parrot, a colorful macaw, not native here, but imported for priests and ruling families among the pueblos

• 29:39Speaker 02

  as a way to signal wealth and status.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  One other region of the West where I've long hiked to rock art sites is the Great Plains. A vast locale of 13,000 years of human inhabitation, but where most of the rock art I've personally explored is actually historic, obviously done by Plains Indian peoples who were acquiring horses and firearms and interacting with Europeans. The White Cliffs of Riding on Stone Provincial Park along the Milk River in southern Alberta preserves the largest collection of rock art anywhere on the Great Plains. A sacred site for the Montana Blackfeet and the Alberta Blackfoot peoples, Riding on Stone presents a labyrinth

• 30:28Speaker 02

  of both painted and carved images. When I roamed the cliffs there in the early 2000s, I was impressed with what I thought was the richest and most elaborate portrayal of horse-mounted battle scenes I'd ever seen anywhere. The northern Great Plains is also the setting of a great tradition of rock imagery archaeologists called shield figures. Shield designs, which at first glance appeared to represent circles or wheels, were a visual and ceremonial appreciation of a military tradition. Usually pictographs, the painted circles portray shield-bearing warriors and may have been done as a result of vision quests by individuals who were warriors rather than shamans.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  The classic site for the shield-bearing warrior figure is Pictograph Cave in the Crow Country, south of Billings, Montana. Another part of the Great Plains that presents really intriguing rock art is the Southern High Plains, and the part I've especially explored for rock art sites is the Caprock Canyonlands country of west Texas. Cowhead Mesa, in the canyons of the Yanawestacato's eastern escarpment, is a typical bread loaf-shaped mesa, indistinguishable at a glance from dozens of others in these canyonlands.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Unlike the rest, it's currently under investigation by the National Register of Historic Places because of its rock art. Compared to farther west, there's not a great deal of rock art here. On the Southern High Plains, most of it's in the valley of the Dry Cimarron River and in Rocky Dell in the Canadian Breaks. There are a dozen or more minor rock art sites in Palo Duro, Thule, Blanco, and Yellowhouse Canyons, and like the pictographs in Rocky Dell, many of them seem traceable to those traveling artists, traders from Pecos and Santa Domingo Pueblos and other Pueblos in New Mexico.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  The Rocky Dell pictographs, which a few years ago some idiot outlined in chalk for his photographs, show a horned serpent like those that appear frequently in the Galistale Basin near Santa Fe. And far out on the plains, on Yellowhouse Crossing Mesa, I've seen a Cocapelli etched into the sandstone. Cocapelli, the humpback flute player, was the pueblo equivalent of the traveling salesman, a slippery rogue with a pack of goods who could sucker men and coax women into joining him in the bushes. The Cocapelli on Yellowhouse Crossing Mesa may be his most easterly appearance in the whole west.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  The rock art on Cowhead Mesa, south of Lubbock, though, is intriguing for two reasons. For one, the Brazos River headwaters canyon where it's located is the rock art capital of the southern plains with nearly three dozen sites. Second, a remarkable number of those sites tell historic-era plains Indian stories. Stories of mounted warriors and shamans, wagon trains and raids. The rock art on Cowhead Mesa, in fact, seems to reveal an Indian perspective on a famous

• 34:01Speaker 02

  historical event in Texas history: the so-called San Saba massacre of the year 1758. The Indian raid on the Spanish mission of San Saba had its origins in the desire of Franciscan priests to missionize and convert Texas Indians to Christianity. When the La Paz Apaches asked for priests to come among them, the Franciscans in Texas interpreted the request to mean that the Lord had at last delivered the pagans unto the fold. They built the Apaches' new mission about 100 miles northwest of San Antonio along

• 34:44Speaker 02

  the San Saba River. It was, in effect and in fact, a blood sacrifice. What the Apaches really intended was to intrude the Spaniards into the eye of a tornado sweeping down on them, a horse-mounted tornado of new buffalo hunters from the north who entered history as the Comanches. A year after the San Saba mission was built, a large force of Comanches shoved their way through the gates, killed the two priests, and burned all the buildings to the ground. Later, they added humiliation to the lesson, routing a Spanish army sent to punish them

• 35:27Speaker 02

  by capturing its artillery and chasing the Spanish survivors around the prairie like chickens. If the rock art on Cowhead Mesa depicts what it seems to depict, one group of the Comanches involved in the sacking of the San Saba Mission headed up the Brazos River into remote canyons at its head. There, they carved into the sandstone face of the mesa their impressions of the event. Mission buildings like layered cakes with crosses on top, flames licking up through them, roundabout men with the frocks of priests, others wearing the three-cornered hats of the age, and scenes of personal combat.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  One glyph is of a bovine with a long, ropey tail and spiraling horns, an Indian impression of a Spanish longhorn. It's the figure that gives the mesa its name. Most powerful of all the scenes on Cowhead Mesa, though, is one showing a looming figure in Comanche buffalo headdress, a shaman with outstretched arms in a classic pose of making things happen. A question that's long puzzled me is why rock art was done where it was. Why this particular mesa, for example?

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Archaeologists tend to point to things like nearby water, protection from the weather, superior rock surfaces, and so forth. But I suspect other things were going on. The geographer Yifu Twan once worked on a theory he called "topophilia." It's one that took on the perceptions some older cultures have that there are sacred places in landscapes, even genie loci, or spirits inhabiting particular power spots. Okay, nonsense, maybe, but one culture's nonsense can sometimes be another's religion.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  And as a matter of fact, I have been upfront and personal with the spirit that inhabits a particular rock art site on the Canadian River in New Mexico.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  It happened on a still fall day with a little haze in the air. I was with a girlfriend who was doing a master's thesis on plains rock art. Thoughtfully parking my old Fiat in a pasture where the horses could have a fair try at licking off its remaining paint. We had hiked a tributary upstream a mile or so to a site some obscure scientific paper reported to be there, and it was. We found it in a small hemispheric rock amphitheater on the south bank of the creek. Walking in, we had passed excellent locations for rock art, had seen nothing, and had grown

• 38:32Speaker 02

  dubious. But the pumice walls of this little grotto, once we got there, were covered top to bottom with scores of stunning spirals, shields, nebula, animal spirits, and dream images. Katie was out of sight below me. I was standing on a rock shelf beside the uppermost petroglyphs, still mildly puzzling over why this particular spot, when the spirit appeared for the first time. I was framing a photograph when I heard the noise of it. Thinking a rattler might be rustling in the grass behind me, I froze.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  The noise, readily audible, a steady whirring, grew louder. I turned around. It wasn't a snake. Whatever it was, it was in midair, about fifteen feet away from and slightly below where I stood on the rim rock. I registered an impression of Katie in the grass below, open-mouthed. Our gazes converged on an indistinct visual disturbance in midair. A whirring plains dervish that was marching in stately fashion around the circumference of the rock cove.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Too stunned to speak or even gesture, we wordlessly watched it walk past us and down to the creek, where, once it hit the cottonwoods, it assumed the form of an ordinary whirlwind.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Rational westermanns können dann satisfiert werden.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Zweimal mehr während der nächsten Stunde erschien der Geist wieder, folgte demselben Weg, erschien aus dem Bäderchoral als ein kleiner Wurzel, der, wie ich vorhin gesagt habe, nur die Erfindung der besonderen topografischen Eigenschaften des Ortes war. Aber die Menschen, die dieses kleine Gebiet mit Symbolen ihrer Kultur verdeckt haben, waren mit einer sehr tiefen menschlichen Einheit zu tun, die jeder, der hier stand, sehen und hören konnte. Jetzt, nachdem wir mit ihrer Realität im Blick genommen haben, habe ich ein bisschen mehr über die Bildung aus alten Amerika verstanden.

• 41:28Speaker 00

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• 43:20Speaker 03

  All right, Dan, so I just want to begin this with sort of a simple point or observation that you made in this episode that kind of stuck with me. And that is when you look at scrapers and bowls and other artifacts, material culture from the past, there's a utilitarian.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  You understand what that was for and why someone did it? And how they used it? And probably how they thought about it? Just more or less. But when you, when you look at rock art, there's this question of intent and motivation. Like if you find an arrowhead on the ground, you think, oh, someone was here. I wonder what they're doing. When you find rock art. You think, what were they trying to say? Or what were they thinking? And there's an added depth to that sort of gap between you and whoever this artifact originated with.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think you got the primary point, Randall. That's definitely, that's it. I mean, we have various ways of sort of touching the past in the West, which of course is, for one thing, it's a very deep past. It goes back more than 20,000 years. And so we've got things like points and pottery and a variety of different tools, which as you said very well, I mean, you can kind of discern, looking at them, handling them, what the intent was, even something about how they were made, but a lot about purpose.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  And, I mean, we have footprints. We have a variety of things. But what we have that probably communicates the hugest body of information are these rock images that appear all over the West. And in that instance, you're looking sort of directly into people's minds and having them instruct you and how they see the world around them. And that's a different thing. That's another level, to be sure, than looking at pure tools. And it's, in a lot of ways, it becomes a mystery

• 45:44Speaker 02

  because the cultures that were here are pretty mysterious to us. I mean, human cultures all over the world tend to be mysterious, one from the other. And so a lot of what the rock art story is about is standing in front of this almost bewildering array of images and signals from the past and trying to figure out what in the world does it mean? What is it trying to convey?

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you... You raised this point as well about sort of intended audience. You know, whenever I look at a piece of rock art, I wonder how long was this legible?

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Passersby? Maybe it wasn't legible to other people at the time. You know, when I drive by some graffiti on a bridge, often I have no idea what somebody was tempted to convey, but um, and then you think, well, maybe I'm part of the intended audience, maybe it's something like a time capsule, right? And so I don't know that there's any, we can arrive at any firm conclusions there, but it's one of those things that, that always makes me wonder that there's a message in there somewhere, who's it for and when and in what context was this meant to be understood?

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's very definitely a way of thinking about audience, which of course is, as writers, uh, we do, you think about who you're writing for, who you're trying to convey a podcast, uh, topic to. And what you assume with, with most rock art is that the audience is the local community, but we don't really know that. I mean, and some of this rock art, I mean, has lasted for so long. I mean, some of the rock art in the West, we know is 8,000 years and older. And, uh, that's not an indication, I don't think, that people who were doing it, uh, were necessarily thinking of some future audience.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  I don't think, for example, the people who did the great gallery, uh, in Canyonlands Park in Utah, had us in mind as an ultimate audience, but they may well, over the generations, have assumed that, yeah, this is intended for down the timeline, for other people to see. And, uh, I do think that probably most of it was intended for a local community, maybe at the very, very moment of time when it was done. But, you know, it's another one of those mysteries that attends to it. Yeah, and I

• 48:24Speaker 03

  There's, there's another aspect to this topic, right? And drawing that distinction between utilitarian items in this art. And that the art is very firmly anchored in place.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  And, and if, you know, if, if in some instances, if it's removed to a museum, something like that, it loses a lot of its meaning.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Cause I can think very clearly, for whatever reason, the past few years, I've encountered a lot of rock art along the Green River, near Echo Park, in the plains of Montana, the upper Missouri breaks in Montana. And in my mind, the place is as much an object. It's like, why here? What was that person doing here? And why was this place significant to them? So.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Another aspect of this, we're just sort of left to wonder.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I, I attempted in the end of this particular script, to address at least one of the experiences that I've had trying to ascertain when looking at a landscape, you can see all sorts of suitable spots.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  And those seem to be ignored in favor of a particular one. And of course, this happened to do with an experience I had quite a number of years ago in New Mexico with a girlfriend who was doing a thesis on rock art. And we were going to this, you know, kind of remote, faintly known, even among archaeologists site and trying to, as we were going in, trying to figure out, so why is there, this looks like a great place for rock art right here. Why is there nothing here? And then we get to this one particular spot and it is just festooned with imagery of every kind, just stunning spirals and nebula and dream figures and creatures and, and.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  It happened to be, I think, associated with the particular dynamics of that spot on the ground, which was catching these whirlwinds that were coming through and not being prepared for that and having that happen while we were there. I mean, that was one of the more stunning, open-mouthed, gobsmacked experiences I have had, because there were many long moments, sort of almost visibly seeing this thing, this spinning object, go through this little cul-de-sac of images where I had no idea what it was. But it did give me an insight that I think I would

• 51:04Speaker 02

  have never had before into why some spots were picked. And so it's made me wonder, every time I find some out-of-the-way piece of rock art, is there something about this spot? It may not be the generator of a whirlwind, but something about the spots, I think, tend to have struck people in the past as some sort of special or sacred place in order to put these images. And so, you're exactly right. The location of them is oftentimes as important as the images that appear there.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I was thinking of another really memorable encounter I had. This was in the Green River. And there was a scene of bighorn sheep, what I assumed to be bighorn sheep, but their horns sort of went straight up and then began to arc back, and they looked like ibex. You know, they didn't look like bighorn sheep. And you make the point that these are abstract representations, right? Like, your inclination, I think...

• 52:15Speaker 03

  If you were to not think about it would be, this is someone who didn't know how to draw a big horn sheep, but you could say the same thing about Picasso.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  You know, in Guernica, it's just, it's.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  You didn't do horses that well.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it makes you take a step back and think about what is it about the big horn that they're trying to convey, right?

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, and some of the, the creature imagery, like there is a horned serpent motif that is very common among the Pueblo people of the Southwest. And I mean, I've seen one on a particular rock art site that I mentioned in this script, it's called Rocky Dell in the Texas Panhandle, that's like about 20 feet long. I mean, it is a gigantic rendering of a horned serpent, but what you have to assume about a horned serpent is that it's a camera. It's not a real thing. It's something out of Pueblo

• 53:16Speaker 02

  stories, creation stories. But those kind of figures often appear interspersed with animals you can readily identify with eagles and coyotes and badgers with, you know, with the nails of their front paws, well represented to show a digging animal. And so it's a, it's kind of a mix of things, but it's often done in a very stylized way. And I mean, just as you said, it's, this is really the discovery of a lot of this kind of art, not only from America, but from other parts of the world, is, was kind of the impetus for the emergence

• 53:56Speaker 02

  of abstract modern art. People like Picasso and Paul Gauguin, for example, were fascinated with this kind of imagery. And Picasso, of course, in particular, began to incorporate it into his work.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think one other, I've found encountering rock art to be a very kind of head spin, like a dizzying experience.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  You know, and it makes you sort of look at your surroundings in a new way and try to put yourself in someone else's mind. And the best comparison I could come up with was.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  Like you go to a medieval cathedral. And you sort of have a sense of why they did this. You know, but, but you'll never actually be able to understand that person's lived experiences and the sort of the, the topography of their imagination in that moment. But it's like a very, it's a very powerful. Experience to, to encounter these things in, in the places where they were created.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's like, um, you know, my, my best sort of remembrances of things like that are like going to, uh, the Mayan pyramids and, uh, the temple of Kukulkan that I mentioned in one of these episodes that I had before they wouldn't let you do it anymore. I got to actually climb to the top of that temple, uh, in Chichen Itza and sort of witness what it all looked like from up there. And, um, it, it's much like rock art in a way to be, uh, in the presence of something like that, that ancient people did.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  And it's probably one of the best examples you'll ever have of, you know, an old truism that we use in history that the past is a foreign country. I mean, and sometimes the past is a really foreign country. Where you really struggle to understand it. And that, that's kind of fascinated me. I've, uh, some of the episodes that are coming up sort of take on that same topic of first contact and what happens when two peoples who have no prior experience with one another meet for the first time and try to understand one another. In this instance, that we're talking about with rock art, you don't have the second person of the first contact to help you understand what's going on.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Even modern native people in most instances can't determine what the rock art in their country often means. They can recognize some of it, but not all of it. And in the instance where you're standing there by yourself, looking at some of these images and trying to figure them out. I mean, it can be, uh, the puzzle of an entire afternoon. And I've certainly done that plenty of times.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  Well, Dan, thanks. I, I appreciate this one because it kind of took me back to some of these moments in my life and kind of got to re, reimagine all that. One more time.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Well, you'll get to see plenty more of it. I know roaming the west because there's a lot of it out there.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thanks, Dan.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  You bet.

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