rock art

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Besides Biology and Firearms, one of our (Mrs and I) great interests is history, primarily Irish and American (because of a Native American and Celtic history on my mother's side).

So, this last weekend, we went camping and to see some NA rock art. Now, we've seen rock art all over the western U.S but this was some of the best we've seen. It was at Horse Thief Lake and is by tour arrangement only (limited to 10 people):

This is very well known and is called :She Who Watches":


This is a NA burial area:


A hunter with an atlatl:


An "enlightened" man (maybe a youth) after undergoing a rite of passage:


An elk:


An osprey with a fish:


An owl:


Stone for sharpening atlatls:


Another owl from another period:
 
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Don't want to rile anyone up, but the Bushmen in South Africa did better paintings many years earlier, and these just don't compare well to what European artists did at caves like Lascaux and Altamira. I've seen some of the early cave art and artifacts in person and it was an awesome experience. I saw items that I'd seen in books. It was quite a thrill.

And my daughter at about age seven was doing better art than a lot of those primitive artists. Her own daughter was also pretty talented at an early age. I have some early pictures they drew of sharks and similar items and you can easily tell what they are.

I'm intrigued with that rock used to "sharpen atlatls". An atlatl is just a wooden or horn handle used to launch shafts like really long arrows. Why would it need to be sharpened? I'm not being sarcastic. I just don't understand the term. The heads on the shafts were flint or obsidian and were chipped to keen edges. Did you mean that the rocks were used to freshen the edges on these points?
 
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Fascinating stuff!!! I had hundreds of picures of various rock art sites around here, but gave them all to the El Paso Archeological Society. The range of subjects was fascinating, and their ability to make lifelike images of animals and humans using such wide lines, and sometimes ( usually in sheltered areas) paint, showed great artistic talent.

Often it was hard to tell what they were picturing: was it a human or was it an arrowhead with two tips at the rear and a glob for a point. They knew what it was, and it's hard for us to get inside their mind given the temporal and cultural divide.
 
Beautiful, and splendidly photographed. Lascaux? No. It's also not the very different and quite wonderful Australian Aboriginal work. But it's a fine expression of a culture where it was at the time, which is what it was meant to be.

I wonder what we'll leave. And who will care, or be around to view it.
 
Excellent photos, thank you for sharing them with us.

Any idea as to the age of the pictographs?
 
Texas Star said:
Don't want to rile anyone up, but the Bushmen in South Africa did better paintings many years earlier, and these just don't compare well to what European artists did at caves like Lascaux and Altamira. I've seen some of the early cave art and artifacts in person and it was an awesome experience. I saw items that I'd seen in books. It was quite a thrill.

And my daughter at about age seven was doing better art than a lot of those primitive artists. Her own daughter was also pretty talented at an early age. I have some early pictures they drew of sharks and similar items and you can easily tell what they are.

I'm intrigued with that rock used to "sharpen atlatls". An atlatl is just a wooden or horn handle used to launch shafts like really long arrows. Why would it need to be sharpened? I'm not being sarcastic. I just don't understand the term. The heads on the shafts were flint or obsidian and were chipped to keen edges. Did you mean that the rocks were used to freshen the edges on these points?
Click to expand...

If you notice, the rock on the left in the picture is more "corrugated" on the top: has a series of parallel grooves. Seems like that could have been used to straighten shafts, possibly for aerodynamic reasons (?). Personally, I would think that wooden tips on atlatls could have been used for small game or even larger fish such as sturgeon (again--??). I have seen 9' sturgeon in the Columbia as well as 50 pound Chinook salmon (heard of 100 pounders).

Age is believed to be about 300 years for she who watches because she is a combination of petroglyph (painting) and pictograph (carving) and from the age of articles found in the graves.

For what it is worth, I have seen very similar art at other sites described as depicting either "cougar" or "bear" (note the "ears" and "snout"
 
i've seen many similar grooves worn in sandstone and limestone outcroppings in the southern Black Hills of SD. Archaeologists say they were worn by Indians who were working arrow shafts. Some of the grooves were at least 8 feet off the ground, and must have been made while seated on horseback. There are old quarries in the Hills where chert was used to make tools and arrowheads.
 
Nice art for sure. As far as im aware--we have nothing like that in my area.
 
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