Very Old Rock Art Revisited

The image above from Utah may look familiar to you as I blogged about it here a couple of months ago as one of the very few possible images of Pleistocene megafauna (a proboscidean) from North American rock art. After posting this I sent copies of this image to two nationally-recognized, heck, internationally-recognized rock art experts and asked their opinion. Both of them are established PhDs, have many articles in peer-reviewed journals, and have published well-received books.

One said that he was familiar with the image and it looked like a good mammoth or mastodon to him. He also said that sometime in the 1950s, some Boy Scouts had "cleaned up" the rock around the petroglyph, scrubbing the desert varnish to make the image look clearer. Unfortunately, that destroyed any possibility of ever getting a good date on when the thing was made, so we will never know if it is of Pleistocene age.

The other expert also was familiar with the image. It was his understanding that it was associated with some historic Ute petroglyphs, and was likely done in the late 19th century after a circus with elephants had come to the area.

Well, as I was telling Steve and one of his good friends recently, part of the joy (and frustration) of rock art studies is the ambiguity of the figures and the difficulty (usually impossibility) of dating them. Lots of archaeology is very open to interpretation and rock art tends to that extreme in the profession.

That said, here is another controversial image of a possible proboscidean from Renegade Canyon in the Coso Range, Inyo County, California. This fellow has a spear sticking out of his back and there are human figures (hunters?) in the foreground that look appropriately scaled. I didn't ask my experts about this one. How does it look to you?

The Coso Range where this petroglyph is found is one of the most intensive rock art areas in North America both in terms of quantity and quality of images. It has also been happily accidentally perserved because it is located on the China Lake Naval Weapons Center near a bombing range and virtually no one is allowed out there. Luckily, I will be able to tour the area in a couple of weeks in conjunction with a professional society meeting and hopefully will bring back some good pictures for you.

I am in the midst of reading Paul Martin's Twilight of the Mammoths that Steve and I have both mentioned in other contexts here. Martin's take on the lack of Pleistocene megafauna rock art (he even mentions the Utah petroglyph above) is that the die-off of the animals was so fast that there was not time to establish the knowledge of their behavior and morphology needed to produce the art. I don't know if I agree with that yet, but it is an interesting question as to why we don't see the rock art in the Americas with these extinct animals that we see in Europe.