Illustrated Daily; Library Footage: Rock Art Potpourri, Petroglyphs, San Cristóbal

A petroglyph is a rock carving. Any design pector scratched into a rock. A petroglyphs, the designs carved and pecked into rocks, reflect people's ideologies, thoughts, often derived from people's religious systems. A petroglyphs directly relate to religious ideas among the Pueblo people. The ones we see here are probably dated between 1350 and 1680 or so, and they directly relate to the iconography of the religion. The petroglyphs are part of the archaeological record, the artistic expression that comes from the people who lived here in the past.

Not only are they artistic expression, but they relate to people's ideas, the ideas that they held, a lot of the animals or symbols. They're not just representations of coyotes and bear and deer, but that they stand for other ideas within the religious system of the people. It's worth preserving it because a lot of that information is now lost. And it comes to us mostly through this imagery. They are a unique source of information because they give us information that you can't get through excavating sites. In other words, the ideas expressed in the art aren't present in a site layout or even in the religious architecture or in the Kivas.

You can't get this kind of information from any other source, and therefore they're valuable. They have previously existed, scratched onto perishable materials and on paintings that were fallen apart, Kiva murals, of which there aren't really very many preserved, but the designs on the rocks have lasted, and they tell us things that we don't know from any other source. Have they been interpreted rather serally by archaeologists or are there still a lot of work to do? There's lots of work to do as a matter of fact, it depends on which petroglyphs you're talking about, but every group of people had their own way of drawing, their own system of images. So if you're talking about the Pueblo rock art in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, yes, it does relate to the ideas and Pueblo religion today, but on the other hand, a lot of it still isn't very well understood, and there's a lot of research yet to be done.

One of the problems is that there's no two figures that are exactly alike, and each figure will take part in expressing a little bit different idea. There's no duplications, you don't find identical figures. And the ideas behind these are extraordinarily complex, and we know that from what we know about Pueblo Indian religion today, and each figure incorporates a little bit different symbolism. How can this benefit you right here to tell you what do you know as an example of looking at that? The world is in the warrior society, and he's a very powerful animal, and he stands for powers of curing, and so forth, and that's undoubtedly why he's represented here in the rock art.

What is the symbolic complex that has to do with the warrior society? Somehow, through rock art, we can see an aspect of the minds of people who have not been with us for thousands of years in the past, and it's like a unique window into an area where no other type of scientific investigation exists. Well, it's really true. It's really true. Now, the older the rock art gets, in the older the cultures get that made the rock art, the more this is true. Often, when we're dealing with hunter-gatherers, you just find their campsites, and hires, lithic scatters, and you can get some idea of what they were eating, and their patterns of exploiting the countryside and so forth.

But it's only through the imagery that they painted or carved on the rock that we have any idea about their thought systems, or any idea at all that they were thinking about things other than what they were going to eat tomorrow morning. Okay, the horn serpent up there in the Taewa world is known as the Awanyu, and he's a powerful deity or supernatural being in the preblo group of gods, and he's known as an underground water serpent, and he has the power to cause earthquakes, and floods, and all kinds of devastation. But on the other hand, he takes care of the underground water sources and the springs, and therefore he has to be treated very well, and he's commonly represented in the rock art of this period. He may have his roots in Ketsakuatl from Mexico, who was a very complicated figure down there, who's a horned and plume serpent. Some of the representations of the horn serpent in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and the Upper Rio Grande are actually shown with feathers, as well as horns.

Horns are a symbol of power, and symbolizes his supernatural aspect, because of course we're not dealing with a naturalistic snake here, we're dealing with a different kind of being. And the feathers indicate his connection with the sky, and the fact that in Mexico he was regarded as a sky serpent, and Ketsal Quadal. Ketsal means, is the name of a bird from southern Mexico, and Quadal is the nawaddle word for snake, so there you have bird snake, Ketsal snake, indicating that he's a figure that incorporates both powers that are in the sky, as well as under the earth. What about these star beings? Well, they're tied in with the water serpent symbolism. These star beings, they're very common in the eye around here, and they may represent an aspect of the heart of the sky god.

Here's another important deity, he is Macachina, he's an actual god, and well known from over at Hopi, but also in the Pueblos here in the Rio Grande Valley, and represents the powers in the sky, has to do with clouds and thunder and lightning and storms. And these star faces probably represent him, because star Cachinas, sometimes he is represented in Cachina form in the western Pueblos, and when he isn't in Cachina form, sometimes he has a star face, or he will be, when he is a Cachina, he has a pointed cap that looks like the top point on the star. And he's associated with fertility, and he has a great complex of ideas surrounding this figure, but he's also, because he's a god of the sky and water and rain coming from the sky, he's also associated with fertility and growing corn and so forth, and it's said that he is associated with the idea of scalping.

There's some coca-pellies, humpback flute players over here in this rock. Coca-pellies, an ancient figure in the Pueblo world, we find them in the rock art from, for about 2,000 years in the southwest. These, of course, are more recent, but he's a humpback god that plays a flute, as his hump, he's playing the flute, sometimes he's wearing horns of feathers, indicating some of his supernatural aspects. There's a second one over here, which is larger, and again he's carrying a flute. This one doesn't seem to be playing the flute, he seems to simply be carrying it. His face is here, and he has a feathered headdress, and he's associated with summer and warm weather and flute playing,

and fertility and corn has said that he carries moisture and seeds in his hump, and he plays the flute to bring the warm weather in the rain. What was that he carries about his hump one more time? He said to carry seeds and moisture, and sometimes presents from maidens. That's quite clear from someone that is graphic artwork on some of them. The presents from maidens, I mean blankets, so to pay them off. Don't put that in. I never put my presents in here.

We see him rendered in the Pueblo world, in the rock art of the Pueblo's for about 2,000 years, and he changes shape, and he has different aspects, and sometimes in the older rock art, he has the attributes of an insect, sometimes that is still carried through in some of the depictions, and he looks like a beetle, sometimes he looks like a cicada, and he has antennae, and he said to the flute is like the seeing of the cicada. There's a lot of reasons to preserve the rock art, and one of them is because it's a valuable expression of the art of people who are here a long time ago. It also incorporates their ideas, and a lot of their ideas about their religion, which otherwise would be lost to us if we didn't preserve it.

And it's important to save as much of it as we can, because like any tribal people, they don't repeat themselves. In other words, there's no duplications. We may find the same figures represented over and over again, but they're represented differently each time. It also is part of the archaeological record. It helps archaeologists understand the prehistoric cultures better. The art styles are a clue as to what people we are dealing with, because every people has a different art style, and expresses itself differently. As far as art goes, rock art is really unique in the art world, because it's the only artifact, the artistic artifact from the past that can be seen in its original context. The rest of the art that we have that has been preserved from prehistory is usually ripped out of context and seen in museums, and isn't seen in the context that it was used and made. But the rock art occurs where it was made, and where people were originally using it, and its functional context.

Sometimes rock art was made just near where people were doing different things. Sometimes it's made along trails. It occurs near springs where people had something to do with springs. It can occur where people were doing nearby, had agricultural activities going on, and so forth. But sometimes it actually was made in the context of shrines and sacred places, and it helps to define the sacred landscape or the sacred geography, which is part of people's mythology. And therefore, it gives us an insight into the prehistoric mythologies that we wouldn't have, and special places in the landscape. So, in other words, we have here an artistic expression that interacts with the landscape, which is very important for understanding people who were here before us. We don't, we interact with the landscape very differently. We tend to exploit it, we tend to see it how we can use it and what we can get out of it.

And these people were relating to it in a very different way, and living with it, and the landscape was very important to them, and how they defined their world, and the rock art documents this type of relationship. Well, I was going to say a little bit more about what's represented on the rocks here. We don't know all about it. It isn't completely researched, even though it does relate to the religious imagery that we find among the modern preblows. A lot of it has changed since modern preblow times. A lot of it, we don't really completely understand it. It will take a lot of research to go back into the ethnographic records, into the records of the preblow people, and be able to understand just what is better. In other words, it really isn't immediately understood because it still relates to the preblow religion, and anyone figure can incorporate a wide variety of ideas. Some of those ideas may have changed by now among the preblows, and we can also relate some of the things that occur here to Mexico.

And the archaeologist viewpoint isn't really the same as the preblow viewpoint. The preblow people know what's going on in their religion now, and they know that very well. But ideas change through time, and what the archaeologist is interested in is the history and development of these ideas, and rock art can tell us a lot about that. Could I, uh, preblow in the nearest preblow come down here and look at these and tell you what they're looking at? I would expect so, or not tell you everything, but tell you what that particular person knew. A preblow person, well versed in his religion, could come down here and explain what a lot of these figures mean to him at this time. And what he would say would be fairly consistent with what was in the minds of the people who made these petroglyphs. On the other hand, these ideas do change through time, and the changes are often documented by the rock art and by the details of what is represented, and that's one of the things the archaeologists can work with.

What about, uh, just the funny, uh, as you question, because we completely have a context, but I ask you anyway, um, can we read these like hieroglyphics, can they tell us a story like that? No, they don't tell us a story really in that sense. They're not meant to tell a story starting here and ending there. What they tell us is ideas. What they often do is relate to myths and stories among the preblow people, and then people recognizing the imagery here could take off on a story and tell you about something, but you just cannot go up to a rock and simply read it. It doesn't put down that way. It wasn't conceived that way in the first place. It's not what they were doing. They were representing, representing symbolically ideas that are important part of their religion, stories, and myths.

The figures that you see together on the rock are often, um, meaningfully related to each other in a way which is significant, uh, but that's very complex, and it may relate to one story, one myth, but the, the, the, the, the figures on the rocks themselves don't tell the whole story or the whole myth. They just represent certain ideas. If that's what's going on at all, but sometimes, sometimes it is. But that really wasn't, I don't think that that's, I don't think that they were put on the, on the rocks to tell a story. I think they're just images from those stories that people carried around their heads and then represent it. And another thing that's very important to understand in which we often do not know as archaeologists is who put the figures on the rocks, and that would tell us a lot about the purpose. In other words, was it somebody who was out tending sheep, which is off in the case, and sheep herders making figures from their store of knowledge on the rocks, and they were just doing it to pass the time,

pass the time of day, or was it priest doing it in connection with the shrine, was it a ritual activity to make the figures in the first place? These are questions that are very difficult for archaeologists and often very difficult to answer, but sometimes we can get answers about these things. But the context in which something was made is extraordinarily important to give us an understanding of, of what's purpose it served and, and possibly the meaning. As well, another thing I should say is that, just keep going. Coutinas, for example, are figures in the preblo world that are very, they capture attention of all peoples, and if you ask a preblo child oftentimes among the western preblows to make a drawing for you, they might well make a drawing of a caoutina, because that's what's interesting, and it's visually an entertaining figure to draw. Maybe that's why some of these figures were put on the rocks. We don't know. They weren't all put up here for purposes of documenting shrines and so forth, but we have to take all of these reasons into consideration when we're trying to figure out why the figures are here.

Could they be likened to, like, illustrations in a book, like various things in our own mythology, if we were to draw a picture of Paul Bunyan, that would be quite different than telling a story of Paul Bunyan. Well, if we did a picture of Paul Bunyan, and we showed it to somebody, the person's reaction might be to tell a story. Oh, yes, that's Paul Bunyan. Let me tell you about him, you see. That's the response that you could get among people, but the whole story is not encapsulated in that image. It's just like a neminic device, a figure that reminds people of something. Another thing about these petroglyphs and rock paintings that we find throughout the landscape here in New Mexico is that they are an irreplaceable expression, artistic expression. In other words, once they're gone, they're gone forever. They aren't replaced. And they are destroyed all the time by vandals, by encroaching civilization, by developments.

And just north of Albuquerque, of course, thousands and thousands of petroglyphs were recently destroyed when they flooded Cochite Reservoir. Those will never be accessible to us again. And only a small sample of those were documented within the archaeological project. So in photographs, do not replace the images on the rocks themselves. Photographs aren't going to last that long, no matter what kind of curatorial treatment they're given. But the rocks, the images on rocks, of course, their longevity is... The fact that they are there is a testimony testament. The fact that they are there still today is a testament of their durability and their longevity and the fact that...