June 19, 2006
About Preserving Petroglyphs Not Yet Lost
The White Tank Mountains of central Arizona defined the distant western horizon for the Valley of the Sun and the Hohokam who lived there for centuries. The mountains were home to Bighorn Sheep, Palo Verde trees, and Barrel Cactus. A narrow canyon descends from near the top, down to an alluvial fan at the desert floor. A nameless creek spills through the weathered granite, as it has for millennia. The canyon is called “Seven Levels”, after the series of ephemeral waterfalls and permanent pools hidden in the steep and tumbling ravine. The slick rock hardly allows any of the riparian growth associated with permanent water.
Up to and through the 1970’s, the White Tanks were also the distant western horizon for the town of Phoenix. Visiting Seven Levels was a wilderness experience. In summer, very real hazards included heat exhaustion, dehydration, and flash flood. In winter, I saw my first tarantula in the wild, frozen into the ice of a pool. I hiked into the Seven Levels many times back then. The granite was cool in the shade, the pools refreshing, the echoes entertaining, the wildlife approachable. At night, lights from Phoenix glittered as a narrow golden streak, just at the horizon. The sprawl didn’t really metastasize until the eighties. But the greatest intrigue were the petroglyphs. Hundreds. Thousands.
At the lowest reaches, where the canyon opens up and the arroyo fans out, the walls and the pillow shaped boulders were solid with rock art, pecked through the desert varnish. They covered every surface from arroyo bottom to the tops of the bouldery hills. Every subject familiar to rock art aficionados was represented. I won’t go into details, but there was reason to believe that more than the Hohokam used this site. It could well have been a special destination for Sinagua, Mogollon, or Anasazi as well, to leave clan symbols and other signs saying “ I made this journey. I was here.”
At the place where the canyon first becomes visible to a walker, there is a large rock that formed a striking cube shape, about 9 feet on each side, and looking like a campus kiosk for all the angled and overlapping images covering its slick surfaces. Located where the jeep trail ended and the faint foot trail into the canyon began, it was the landmark place of rendezvous with friends, the place where Search and Rescue formed its teams, the place to stash extra water, the place where cameras were pulled out of their cases.
I speak of this particular rock in a mix of present tense and past tense, because today, in the 2000’s, the boulder is still there...only now it is about 6 feet on each side, and irregular in shape. And stripped of all petroglyphs. They have been broken off in slabs, to decorate the yards and walls of expensive homes. A modern park kiosk stands in front of it, moderately vandalized, warning about snakes, tick fever, rabies, heat, and thirst. This is a stones’ throw away from a paved parking lot, a tot-lot full of fiberglass playground equipment, a group picnic ramada, a restroom, and a row of snack machines, where a cola machine labors mightily during the heat of the day, and lights up the canyon walls at night.
It gets worse. Fifty yards away is a small interpretive sign that alerts visitors that, with a keen eye, they might spot…a petroglyph! The sign includes a drawing of an animal figure, and points to a rock face, high above and far away, where this same figure can be seen. This is a shocking sight to me, because this is almost the only rock art now visible in the canyon. Everything has been split, broken, cut, or blasted off the walls. For a mile and a half, it looks like a quarry. I had not conceived it was possible for so much “protected” material to be so boldly looted over so extensive an area.
It is difficult to excite many Phoenicians about this loss, or about protecting what remains. The tiled-roof ghettoes now line up, row-on-row, only a quarter mile from the kiosk at the mouth of the Seven Levels canyon. Development has reached to the White Tank Mountains and leaped beyond them. If you don’t know what is gone, you can’t miss it, can you?
Clearly, folks like me have issues beyond the simple preservation of a finite treasure. Often we remember these exquisite features in a natural context nearly identical to that in which they were created. And it is logical to think that this context will tell us about the people who made them, their emotional states, their lives and challenges. We try to put ourselves in their place, and ask, “Was it a record of a special journey? A contest among bored teenagers? Part of a spiritual ceremony? A boundary? A refuge?” When you turn around from a panel of petroglyphs and look out across open desert, it seems possible to put yourself in the place of a pre-Columbian muralist. When one turns around from a panel and faces, instead, a concrete wall, or in this case a humming coke machine, it doesn’t seem so possible. And only if the panel still exists at all. I confess that it is not just the rock art I mourn. It is also the lost context.
Even where development remains at a distance, petroglyphs suffer many indignities from uninformed visitors. People still rub them, chalk them (for photographs), draw over them with crayons, all of which reduces their life span. And this doesn’t even cover casual vandalism. As recently as June 2006, Picture Canyon petroglyphs have been sprayed dayglo colors by paintball players trespassing at will on State Lands. In some places, fundamentalists of some sort use their own logic to target individual elements to be rubbed or pecked out of existence, returning over and over until a site becomes a stony pox.
There are going to be a lot of cases like this one in coming years; there will be no preventing it. But there will also be a lot of cases that can be prevented, if we know and recognize these places. Even if the only way we know them is through the eyes of another visitor, a writer, or a photographer.
Fortunately for Picture Canyon, a resurgent effort to complete the recording of its trove, begun by Colton in about 1919, has occured in the spring of 2006. This has led not only to an amazing feat of documentation, but a far better appreciation of the value of the resource there. Staff from the Museum of Northern Arizona, contractors from Rupestrian Cyberservices, and others, are doing this work, which may result in a request to add Picture Canyon the National Register of Historic Places. Unfortunately, neither a request or actual listing will directly result in protection from vandals or developers.
Set aside issues of development and vandalism for the moment. Those issues require political solutions and raised awareness and all the baggage that goes with them. While modern exploitation and development pose a great threat, sometimes the danger comes from natural forces. The remarkable climate of the southwest has preserved seemingly vast numbers of petroglyphs. In some of these places, it is possible to predict that within another, say, fifty years, give or take human destruction or intervention, they will be reduced to sand and gone. It would a wise thing to invest in documenting these locations, and soon. There is no reason to think that Native Americans in the east were not equally prolific, but the eastern climate has erased their record. The millennia of dry conditions in the Southwest has preserved our apparent trove, but no doubt it is but a fraction of the original store. Even in our climate, much of it flakes, spalls, or washes away every year. After all, we are talking about hundreds of years. Sometimes more than a thousand years.
Not all petroglyphs are created equal. They are pecked into granite, basalt, limestone, and sandstone substrates. Petroglyphs on basalt fall victim to all the disasters mentioned, and so do granitic sites. Limestones are much more vulnerable to natural decay, while it is sandstones which are in by far the most immediate danger of being lost, and are being lost minute by minute, figure by figure, panel by panel There are spectacular sites in Arizona and Nevada, etched into sandstones which have been reduced by as much as a third or half just with the last fifty years. Sometimes, only thirty years, or just twenty, have cost us irreplaceable panels. A lot of these panel sites were chosen where rising water, frosts, or winds can soften or scour them away. They really need our intervention and attention, an emergency basis, if we are to “know” our cultural heritage, and thereby appreciate it, marvel at it, value it, share it, and learn from it.