Ancient Desert Messages, Meanings Unknown

At Painted Rocks, people scratched out a record that defies clear interpretation ANCIENT DESERT MESSAGES

A HUMAN FIGURE STANDS hesitantly at the entrance of a winding maze. A sun burns its way across a black sky. A strange creature, looking much like the monster in the Alien film series, scuttles across an ocher field. A lizard basks in light, while deer and pronghorn antelopes gather for water. And an outstretched hand waves across the centuries, as if to say, I once was, and I am here still.

On a broad, sandy plain in the western desert of Arizona stands a low mound of volcanic boulders, rising just a dozen feet or so above the creosote-studded desert floor. A casual observer catching a glimpse of them from a car window could be forgiven for thinking that someone heaped those rocks up deliberately, back in the days when the world was young, so regularly placed and so seemingly out of place is the pile. In fact, though, some ancient volcano deposited the rocks there eons ago. They are so old and weathered that they crumble almost at the touch, their patina easily scratched by a fingernail or twig.

For just that reason, the ancient people of the desert country-Archaic period people and the Hohokam, forebears of Arizona's present-day south-central and southwestern Indian tribes-made a sign or a message board out of the mound. With hammerstones they pecked hundreds of petroglyphs, or rock carvings, on the soft, pitted surfaces of the stones, leaving a record about which people have wondered, speculated and argued ever since.

The place is called Painted Rocks, a translation of piedras pintadas, meaning "marked rocks," as the Spanish soldiers under Juan Bautista de Anza called them when they passed by 225 years ago. (There is some evidence that some of the glyphs may indeed have had paint on them.) Unlike most other important petroglyph sites in the Southwest, it is not tucked away cliffside in a remote canyon or hidden in a cave, but out in the open southwest of Phoenix near the Woolsey Peak Wilderness. The rocks are about 3 miles from the banks of the Gila River on a plain that, in their day, saw good populations of pronghorns, deer and bighorn sheep, to judge by the abundant zoomorphic carvings at the site.

The animals did their part in sustaining many people in the desert surrounding Painted Rocks over the years. Archaeologists have cataloged nearly a hundred sites nearby where people of the Hohokam civilization worked or lived. These sites range widely in age, but the petroglyph site itself has been worked for a thousand years and more.

The chronology is imprecise. There is a little expert disagreement, too, about why the site stands there in the first place, so easy of access to anyone who happens by, friend or foe. According to Cheryl Blanchard, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management, it may have simply been a landmark on an ancient trade route, a waypoint mentioned when one traveler explained the route to someone else.

At least one petroglyph panel functions as a kind of astronomical observatory, and indeed the light of the sun around the summer and winter solstices illuminates carvings hidden deep within the boulders, not easily discernible at other times of the year. The number of visitors to Painted Rocks increases each year as the solstice approaches, says Blanchard, but her research has not found any archaeological evidence to support this astronomical theory.

Such use, however, seems to explain the site's many representations of heavenly bodies: the sun, other stars, Venus and the crescent moon. Together, they offer a purpose for the site as a timetelling device, perhaps signaling when to begin spring planting of the irrigated fields along the nearby Gila River.

In November 1848, a medical doctor named John S. Griffin traveled along the Gila. He was not impressed by the countryside, of which he wrote in his diary, "One day's march on the river is so much like unto another that one description will do for all, that is to say, sand, dust, and a black stone, so blistered from the effects of heat that they look like they had hardly got cool-no grass, nothing but weeds and cactus." But then, he added for his readers in oddly telegraphic prose, "I neglected to note a stone we passed on the 16th or rather a hill of stone-all carved up with Indian hieroglyphics-the sun moon & stars-horned frogs-Attempts at the human form divine, were the most frequent forms-they seemed to be of recent date-whether cut in sport or to commemorate some great event we could not tell."

Wanting explanations, some people have expanded Griffin's great-event approach to the place, speculating that Painted Rocks may mark a division between ancient tribal boundaries, the borderland between the inland desert peoples and those of the lower Colorado River. Some writers have even suggested that the place com-memorates a treaty to establish just those boundaries and, while none of the petroglyphs easily lends itself to being read as a sign of peace, strictly speaking, it seems entirely reasonable that the two groups would have wanted to commemorate something so important, even if it may not have held for long.

But only the persons who put the figures there really know the meaning. We are forever left to guess what Painted Rocks really meant to the people who made it, who probably had many motives for making their marks on those desert stones. The possibilities for inter-pretation are endless. For instance, Polly Schaafsma, archaeologist and authority on Southwestern rock art, notes that a four-pointed star can variously represent a rain-bringing Katsina, the planet Venus or the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl or one of his northerly reflections; it may even speak to a war-related ceremony, for the sun is a symbol of conflict as well as of life.

I think of Painted Rocks along all-of-the-above lines: part museum, part historical document, part newspaper, part church, a place that enshrines ancient aspirations (may we have a good hunt, may there be plenty of water for us and the animals we chase) and observations (these are the kinds of animals we see in this place, this is what a storm looks like). Just as a single petroglyph does, the very place lends itself to all kinds of readings. Some see that Alien monster in the rocks, others a particularly fecund sheep. Some

And so we visited around a blazing campfire until late at night, sharing stories and guesses about what the rocks meant, until, talked out, we took our respective leaves and went off to sleep under a dense canopy of stars.

Some see a Latin cross, others a dragonfly. Some see a weather-worn squiggle, others the god of the winds.

Then there are the dozens of images that seem hard to read as anything other than what they are: snakes, lizards, centipedes, even a man on a horse. That last, of course, presupposes that people were still adding art to the site after the arrival of the Spanish and their steeds.

Painted Rocks, designated on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, was once part of the state parks system, appearing on maps as Painted Rocks State Historic Park. In 1989, ownership passed over to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which maintains the historic site and its campground.

I cannot help but think that it needs more proactive preservation, even though most modern people seem to have enough sense to refrain from adding their marks to the place, at least deliberately. Even if one scratching proclaims that one "EMS" was there in 1967, most of the other non-native graffiti are of an earlier vintage: an E.L. Walker from San Diego in 1927, one Mr. Davenport from Wyoming Territory, who found his way there in 1907, an "A.A.T." who thought it important to commemorate his visit in 1929.

Chuck Wilson, a grizzled former Special Forces soldier who, until last year, worked as the site's seasonal campground host and good-natured ambassador of goodwill, kept a close eye out on the rocks and those who came to visit. He asked those people to be careful not to touch any of the carvings, for scientists have discovered that the oils naturally found in human skin can eat away over time at such delicate rock carvings, just as the enzymes in condensed breath have been enough to erode the Paleolithic cave paintings of southern France. Painted Rocks changes a little every day, Wilson reflected, sometimes because of the work of nature, sometimes because of people who, inadvertently or not, leave a trail wherever they travel, and sometimes leave the path that winds through the rocks to get a closer look at some particularly interesting image.

"The BLM wouldn't let me shoot them," the genial Wilson growled of those who disregarded his instructions, "but I could give them a mean look and point out my dogs." His dogs, twin behemoths who looked as if they'd be happy to ingest a wrongdoer for a snack, were usually enough to do the trick.

Visitors to Painted Rocks who travel up the spine-rattling dirt Rocky Point Road about 4 miles beyond the site can see the location of one infamous incident that has come to be known as the Oatman Massacre. Here, in 1851, an Indian war party attacked an immigrant family, the Oatmans of Illinois, who had gone ahead of a wagon train in their eagerness to reach California. All but three of them were killed: 16-year-old son Lorenzo Oatman was left alongside the trail, while 14-year-old Olive Ann and 7-year-old Mary Ann Oatman were sold by their captors to a Mojave Indian band along the Colorado River. Mary Ann died of illness, but Olive Ann was ransomed in 1856 and went on to live in Texas, where, in old age, she wistfully remarked that she wanted "to go and see some of her old friends, even if they were Indians."

The site of the massacre, not far from the increasingly rough road, is marked only by an iron rod with some engineer's tape on it, recently refreshed by some of Olive Ann's descendants, who left a note in a plastic bottle wishing their fellow travelers well.

Painted Rocks sees about 3,000 visitors each year -not many as tourist sites go. When photographer Jack Dykinga, Tucson-based journalist Dan Sorenson and I visited there on a January weekend, we found ourselves alone for much of the time. When others eventually arrived a photographer from Belgium, a young Canadian couple on their way West, a retired scientist from Japan-the ancient rocks seemed to beg for conviviality among those lucky enough to be alive to enjoy them, a treaty marker for our time. And so we visited around a blazing campfire until late at night, sharing stories and guesses about what the rocks meant, until, talked out, we took our respective leaves and went off to sleep under a dense canopy of stars.

There is nothing quite like it in all of Arizona, few places like it anywhere on Earth. Ever changing, Painted Rocks commands our respect and even reverence, a place that calls across distance and the centuries to say, I was here-and may I always be here. All