One of our vacation stops was El Morro National Monument east of Zuni pueblo in west-central New Mexico. This striking mesa has been a landmark along a heavily used travel route for hundreds of years.
Rainfall and snowmelt from the mesa top drains down this channel and waterfall into a large pool, also providing incentive for travelers to stop here. Native American, Spanish colonial, and historic Anglo passers-by have etched petroglyphs and inscriptions into the soft sandstone on the sides of the mesa.
There are many Spanish colonial inscriptions dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. Almost all include the formulaic phrase paso por aqui - "passed by here." This is the earliest and most famous of those, left in 1605 by Don Juan de Onate (afraid my keyboard won't let me put the ~ over the n) the leader of the initial Spanish colonization of New Mexico. As you can see, a Native American petroglyph was later done over his inscription.
There are many Native American petroglyphs all around the mesa. Here is a shot of some of these.
This petroglyph was Connie's favorite: a fat quail, complete with feather topknot.
2 comments:
Reid my wife has this thing about prehistoric artifacts: Show her a spearpoint or a scraper and she'll see a chipped rock. It's a glass-half-full thing, I think. :-)
Anyway, it's funny to note that I see your quail perfectly---looks just like one---but Shelly would say, "Prove it!"
For the N + tilde and other special characters, go here.
Or just search for "HTML entities."
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