Peter Pilles and the 'Rocks of Ages'

The Incredible Rock Art of the Arizona Strip

Text by Ron McCoy Photographs by Terrence Moore The Arizona Strip-90,000 square miles of canyonlands and wilderness reaching from the Grand Canyon's North Rim to the Utah border-radiates that sense of timelessness found only in remote places. This is the sparsely populated land of Vermil ion and Hurricane cliffs, Bull Rush and Lookout canyons, the Uinkaret and Kaibab plateaus; home of such exotic placenames as Crazy Jug Vista, Yellow John Mountain, Antelope Valley, Wolf Hole, and Suicide Ridge. This Strip country, where the mountain lion, deer, bear, and buffalo roam, is dominated by the Grand Canyon. Here Indians placed split-twig figurines of animals in cave shrines around 3000 B.С., and geological history, plowing through Coconino sandstone, Hermit shale, Manakcha and Watahongi formations, slices back some two billion years into the Precambrian era. In this empty land, which Southern Paiutes entered some 800 years ago and Anglo pioneers began settling seven centuries later, people who wish it can find rare solitude, losing themselves in a maze of towering mountains and steep-walled, endlessly winding canyons. And here, along precipices and promontories, galleries filled with prehistoric masterpieces of rock art rise from sandy arroyos, vault up cliffsides, and spread out across the untrammeled terrain of an ancient world's explosive imagination.

The magic of painted pictographs and a few incised petroglyphs stands as testimony to more than 10,000 years of Indian habitation. First on the scene, between 12,000 and 8000 B.С., were PaleoIndians, stalkers of mammoth and buffalo. Then bands of Archaic-period hunters and gatherers arrived, armed with devastating spear-throwers called atlatls. Nearly two and a half millennia ago, still another people appeared. For the period up to A.D. 700, scientists call them Basket Makers; they were builders of pit house villages who, toward the end of their time, began making pottery. The prehistoric waters are murky, but some Basket Makers may have become the Fremont people, normally linked to southern Utah. Other descendants evolved into the Virgin River branch of the far-flung Anasazi. After 1150, for reasons still unknown, the Anasazi left. Having vanished into history's opaque mists, the ancient peoples are made all the more mysterious by the painted and pecked messages they sent across the ages. Their rock art is reminiscent of an unfamiliar folk dance accompanied by verses lilted in a foreign language. The spellbind ing dance and its haunting music stir our senses-but what does it all mean?

Some of the most visually captivating, emotionally stirring scenes from this art of the past are preserved at the Labyrinth and the Wall, a stunning pair of isolated, little-known sites where prehistoric peoples painted pictographs and pecked or scratched petroglyphs onto Mother Earth's rocky but receptive surface. Because the Labyrinth and Wall are so remote, so seldom visited, and therefore subject to vandalism, their actual names and locations have been masked here.

Any sensitive person has to be appalled by the amount and degree of intentional, human-caused damage to rock art - bullet holes, scratching, painting over, prying entire painted panels loose. "Vandalism destroys these eloquent statements of humanity forever," observes Marietta Davenport, a Kaibab National Forest archeologist and longtime resident of the Strip. "Rock art sites like the Labyrinth and the Wall are part of our national heritage, unique expressions of the spirituality of prehistoric people, a window through which we glimpse something beyond tangible material culture. But when rock art is destroyed, that window onto the landscape of the past slams shut."

The Labyrinth and the Wall are alike only in that the art at both was made by prehistoric Indians. That's about all they have in common.

The focus at the Wall is a 60-foot-long mural displaying more than 40 maroon, red, white, orange, yellow, and green specters, some of them seven feet tall, who appear as though they stepped out of a fantasy more bizarre than anything encountered in one of Edgar Allan Poe's nightmares.

The Labyrinth is a bit more low-key, boasting illustrations of bighorn sheep and atlatls, a shaman calling upon a spirithelper to bring herds of deer and elk to his comrades, and larger-than-life images of ancients wearing sashes, feathered caps, looping necklaces, and enormous earrings.

For miles along the Labyrinth-around practically every corner, behind each rocky outcrop, in the mouths of caves and crevices where the Indians of long ago camped or prayed, high up on towering cliffs-one sees the paintings and incising

of prehistory. The paint used by ancient artisans in the Labyrinth came from the earth: yellow, red, blue, green, and white. And it is everywhere, deep and rich in hue under outcroppings, faded where it is farther from shelter against the elements, vanishing altogether on fully exposed rock faces.

First one painting is visible, then another, and soon the viewer is awash in a cascading primeval sea of color and image: a parading trio of turkeys, an atlatl, lines of dancers, the eyeless sockets of isolated figures (men? women? gods?) following your path, lobster-claw hands pointing to others farther down the lines of images, some so worn that they have lost distinguishing figures and gone geometric. This, truly, is the stuff of ancient dreams and visions.

The immediate sensation is one of awe, soon followed by the sort of uneasy familiarity a trespasser might feel while inspecting someone else's property. The bodies of many of the horned and feather-bedecked men in the Labyrinth, some striped green, red, and yellow, have the broad-shouldered, nearly V-shaped trapezoidal torsos so typical of Fremont rock art painted in southern Utah, north of the Arizona state line. The Fremont people and their entire way of life-they made tipis and wore moccasins, not the yucca sandals favored by so many Southwesterners-seem too much related to Plains Indian tribes to fit smoothly with conventional concepts about the region's prehistory. If much of the rock art in the Labyrinth was made by Fremonters, accounts of prehistory will need revising. Then again, this might be the work of Basket Makers, done between A.D. 1 and700. If so, the line marking the point where Basket Maker leaves off and Fremont begins is blurred more than archeologists once suspected. In fact, the Strip's prehistory is a cipher for scientists. “The Arizona Strip is one of the last frontiers of archeology in the Southwest,” Deborah Ann Westfall of Abajo Archaeology, a consulting firm based in Bluff, Utah, points out. “Challenges and questions abound. The answers must wait.” One thing is certain: by casting doubt on conventional wisdom and presenting us with other possibilities, the Labyrinth's paintings make it one of those places where questions about the human saga arise and some surprising answers may yet be found. The most dramatic painting in the Labyrinth is one so old, so brittle, so worn by water and weather that its message cannot be captured through photography. Even in its advanced state of disintegration, though, this remains a prehistoric masterpiece. An appropriate name for the fresco might be the Wise Ones.

The Wise Ones depicts eight men, somewhat larger than life, people from a time we cannot even imagine, reflections of a way of thinking as utterly alien to us as ours would be to them. They wear red caps with feathers on top-much like those seen on the gods in Navajo sand paintingsyellow face paint, large disks in their ears, pendulous strands of red and yellow necklaces. Turquoise blue and rustred zigzag lines connect the Wise Ones, zapping from one man's temple to the next and on down the line. The Wise Ones have survived in fragmentary form, buried by alluvial deposits to just below their chests. Underneath, thesoil has leached the colors, removing all traces of the specters' lower bodies. The rock on which the Wise Ones are painted is flaking, chipping, cracking, eroding away, more and more day by day. Soon, the time of the Wise Ones will be done, and one day it is possible nobody will know they existed. Yet it is also just possible that the rock that serves as their home may never completely lose the special feeling it has acquired by virtue of the Wise Ones' mute yet strangely eloquent presence.

The Wall rushes up from the ground like a sandstone wave about to engulf the viewer. The paintings here, nestled snugly beneath a massive overhang, differ from those at the Labyrinth in layout, scale, and appearance. These figures are done in what is known as Barrier Canyon style, a type of art favored by the Indians of the Archaic period. There are no signs of prehistoric communities nearby, nothing hinting at the eerie universe captured by those who painted here. Along the Wall, protected from the erosive forces of wind and rain by the depth of the overhang, looms a line of utterly unfathomable creatures. The artists who left their mark here painted deer, snakes, bighorn sheep, and, most dramatic of all, “Ghost” figures elongated, distorted, mummylike beings. They seem human-like and are known as anthropomorphs, from Greek words meaning “form” and “man.” These beings, numbers of which exist here, drift along the rock in much the same way they come to us across time: with quiet dignity, sureness of purpose, and a power that transcends eons. It is easy to imagine these creatures belonged to a "Dream Time" like those in the rock art of Australia's aborigines, an era of creation that exists forever in parallel relationship to human time.

The most likely answer to the question of why the Wall paintings exist is that they were somehow tied to ceremonies involving shamanism. A shaman is someone who exerts authority in religious matters through direct personal contact with the supernatural. By calling upon forces others can only imagine, a shaman helps bring such blessings as an abundance of game animals.

Those who conducted the rituals held here have long since vanished. No blackened sand marks the spot of their last fire. No offerings are present. There is in fact absolutely nothing left to remind us of that long ago Dream Time, save the overpowering paintings at the Wall.

The rock art at the Labyrinth and the Wall envelop the visiting pilgrim with a sensation of having somehow fallen backward in time, of returning to an era when people traced roots deep into the earth and linked themselves with sparkling objects in the nighttime sky. For this rock art works a spell, suspending any sensation of time's passage from past to present, much less into the future. Time without meaning, meaning unfettered of time's bonds: that's something of the message imparted by such obviously sacred places as these.

All of these images, human or animal, natural or supernatural, whether at the Labyrinth or the Wall, convey impressions of ways of life and thought we can never know but to which we are drawn as if by a force as old as humanity itself. If that force has a name, it must be curiosity bred of a sense of kinship, the yearning to recognize and experience a common human bond. So perhaps there is more to the idea that Dream Time obliterates distinctions between the past, present, and future than we even suspect.

We will never know exactly who made the rock art at the Labyrinth and the Wall, when they did it, or why. But some guesses can be hazarded.

First, there's the question of age. Judging by comparisons with other sites, the Labyrinth's pictographs and petroglyphs log a respectable 10 to 20 centuries or so on history's clock. The blow-away surprise is the Wall, where the paintings may go back as much as 5,000 years, to about the time construction began on the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Much has been written and said over the years about the prehistoric Southwest's rock art. Once you push aside spaceman theories or visions of the "lost" continents of Atlantis or Mu, once you brush away exotic tales of wandering Egyptians, Romans, and Chinese, a few ideas remain for consideration.

Hardly anybody still views rock art as nothing more than ancient graffiti. Some claim practically all pictographs and petroglyphs are narratives that can be read like a book. Illustrations of this type, though rare, do exist, most notably at Canyon de Chelly, where Navajo rock art commemorates an 1858 fight with Utes, and another example calls attention to an 1804-1805 Spanish expedition into tribal territory.

Others see the symbols' primary role as conveyors of information about the location of watering spots, territorial boundaries, and the like. But the true purpose

of much rock art may be far less prosaic than that.

"Prehistoric rock art isn't a language waiting to be translated word-for-word," says Santa Fe-based artist-archeologist Polly Schaafsma, author of Indian Rock Art of the Southwest, a modern classic. "Instead, it's a language of symbols linked to religion and ritual."

Schaafsma believes much rock art existed within the ethereal realm of prehistoric spirituality, highlighting locations for holding ceremonies, pinpointing the sacred places where mythological events occurred and divinities were encountered.

In other words, rock art seems to have served as a beacon marking contact points where the natural world met that of the supernatural. If so, it was an aid in people's attempts to make sense of the mysterious workings of their universe. Through the religiously inspired creations of mortals, openings were created to a realm of wonder, in which drawings, paintings, and incised figures served as prayers. Prayers for victory in war, for abundant food, for the promising increase of the tribe, and for its continued success. Details of that religion must forever remain unknown.

The meaning of this art is not linked to some universal symbolism but firmly rooted in the cultures from which the images flowed. For example, on the basis of surviving beliefs among some South-western Indian tribes, the trio of fat, red-bodied, yellow-necked turkeys marching along a ledge at the Labyrinth may have conveyed thoughts about the dead. Mountain sheep possibly represented ideas about fertility and plenty. Spirals could have stood for wind or water, or even people's migrations.

bodied, yellow-necked turkeys marching along a ledge at the Labyrinth may have conveyed thoughts about the dead. Mountain sheep possibly represented ideas about fertility and plenty. Spirals could have stood for wind or water, or even people's migrations.

"Prehistoric rock art is just the tip of the iceberg we face in trying to grasp the thoughts underlying ancient cultures," Polly Schaafsma explains. "Of course, we'll never understand its exact meaning. Still, many of those who come into contact with rock art immediately recognize its amazing power for collapsing the barriers of time and space that separate the present from the past."

We moderns, so concerned with knowing everything and pegging all things into categories, are stymied by rock art. Certainly, we measure the size of pictographs and petroglyphs; we classify them by style. But the soul of this art remains fundamentally beyond our ken, separated from us not merely because it comes from another time but because it emanates from a different world. Yet we keep on trying to figure it out, to understand what about the human mind could spawn images that continue to strike a responsive chord within us so long after the act of creation.

Perhaps that's the true nature of the painted magic worked at such places as the Labyrinth and the Wall.

If so, may the incantation continue to confound roaring wind, pelting rain, biting frost, merciless sun, and mindless vandals. May the spell never be broken but last forever, enchanting people for as long as the paintings along all the walls, in all the labyrinths, whisper their eternal and ethereal, puzzling, and provocative message.

Editor's note: Policies regarding access to rock art sites vary from one jurisdiction to another. For reasons Mr. McCoy explains in this article, visits by the public to "the Labyrinth" and "the Wall" (coined names) are not encouraged by officials of the Kaibab National Forest. For discussion of a different approach to combating vandalism in the Coconino National Forest, turn to page 12.

Selected Reading

Rock Art of the American Indian, by Campbell Grant. Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1976.

Indian Rock Art of the Southwest, by Polly Schaafsma. School of American Research and University of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe and Albuquerque, 1980.

Award-winning author Ron McCoy wrote "Burial of the Magician" for the August 1988 Arizona Highways.

Free-lance photographer Terrence Moore lives in Los Alamos, N.M.