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May 2013
CATALYSTMAGAZINE.NET
Continued:
Visiting Rock Art of the Canyonlands Ancestors It’s a sad dilemma that any public description of rock art locations exposes it to an extreme risk of vandalism. There are, however, three significant, high profile Barrier Canyon Style panels that are essentially in the public domain. Two are within an hour’s drive from Green River, the third is a little more with a good hike at the drive’s end. All are accessible on well-maintained dirt roads.The Sego Canyon and Buckhorn Wash panels both received major, professional restoration in the mid-90’s to remove decades of vandalism. The type-site for this rock art style, Horseshoe Canyon (AKA Barrier Canyon) is part of Canyonlands National Park. A few years ago a chainlink fence was installed for protection of the Great Gallery and a park ranger is usually on patrol.
Sego Canyon Take I-70 east from Green River for approximately 24 miles, take the turnoff to Thompson Springs (Exit 185). Drive north through town on SR 94 and continue on the dirt road for approximately three miles to a parking area for the rock art.
Buckhorn Wash Take I-70 west from Green River for approximately 30 miles, take the dirt road (Exit 129) north, backtracking for a little over three miles until the road turns and continues north for approximately 16 miles to cross the San Rafael river bridge. In approximately five miles the the rock art will appear on the canyon walls beside the road.
Horseshoe Canyon Take I-70 west from Green River for approximately 13 miles, take SR 24 (Exit 147) south for approximately 24 miles to about a half mile south of the Goblin Valley turnoff. Turn east on the dirt road to the Hans Flat ranger station of the Maze district of Canyonlands N.P. Bear right at the first fork, left at the second fork, continuing to a signed junction after about 25 miles. Turn left, and its about six more miles from this junction with signs marking the way to the turnoff on the right and the rim of the canyon. The hike into the canyon and upstream to the Great Gallery is seven miles round trip. “Snake in Mouth”
EXPLORING ANCIENT UTAH the rock art’s motifs have been excavated upcanyon. Fortunately, that work was done by professional archeologists who could date the clay figures by depositional layers in which they were found. These figurines could have been left behind “as early as 6,000 to 8,000 ago,” according to an article by Betsy L. Tipps, “Barrier Canyon Rock Art Dating,” that appears in the National Park Service publication The Archeology of Horseshoe Canyon (available free online). Specific to the paintings, carbon dating of actual paint fragments from stylistically related sites found elsewhere and also described in the article pulls the creation of the paintings forward to between 4,000 and 1,700 years ago. Older isn’t necessarily better. But with rock art there’s a point where art starts to evolve (or devolve) toward the iconography of writing. These are two distinctly different forms of communication—one visceral and one pragmatic. Think of the difference between Picasso’s “Guernica” and the ideograms of Chinese text in which each character incorporates a simplified representation of what it identifies. Both are symbolically loaded. But one is a punch in the gut and the other may be instructions for hooking up a DVD player. Most of the chipped-in rock art (also known as petroglyphs) of later prehistoric cultures, Fremont, Basketmaker and Pueblo, seem to be, with their stylized manner, moving more toward those ideogramic representations and away from more evocative forms of art. But, the preeminent thing about BCS paintings (also known as pictographs) thrives in the fact that they are intentionally enthralling— both emotionally and imaginatively, rather than intellectually. *** As we stand gawking like museum tourists below the focus of our quest, we are not too distant as the crow flies from the BCS type-site in Horseshoe Canyon. We recognize familiar elements of that style’s rock art. Predominating are larger-thanlife moon-eyed demigods whose hypnotic stares have, ever since Spielberg, been associated with ET. These often limbless torsos do have an other-worldly quality. Southern Utah artist and archaeologist Joe Pachak (known from his work with the Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding) speculates that some
figures from the Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon could be representations of “shroud-wrapped bodies,” possibly prepared for exposed sky-burials. This might explain the BCS sites’ absence of the preserved interments common to Fremont, Basketmaker and Pueblo cultures. Whether or not Pachak’s educated guess is accurate, it resonates with beliefs and rituals of one of the oldest surviving southwestern Native American cultures. The Hopi, who have lived for centuries on their
This is the old stuff, centuries or millennia older than prehistoric Fremont, Pueblo and Basketmaker cultures, and possibly ancestral to some. defensive mesa tops in what is now northeastern Arizona, may or may not be descendants of the artists of the BCS culture. Being hunter-gatherer, seasonal nomads, those ancient artists left behind little evidence of their material culture except their magnificently durable rock art. Some Hopi clans do, however, have direct lineages or oral traditions going back to the prehistoric Basketmaker and Pueblo cultures (both commonly known as Anasazi or more recently as Ancestral Puebloan). Some Hopi katsinas (aka kachinas), whether carved cottonwood figurines or ritual masquerades, are representations or embodiments of transcendent ancestors; in tabloid parlance, dead celebrities—think Bogart and Lincoln. Some are recent enough to be associated with remembered individuals. Some have been in oral tradition for so many centuries that they’ve metamorphosed into demigod myths— think Moses or Ulysses. Whenever I visit Horseshoe Canyon and stand in front of the figure most often referred to as “the Holy Ghost,” I see the Hopi’s skullfaced Maasawu. This intimidating demigod, according to oral tradition, led the Hopi clans out of their “third world”: out of the Chaco Canyon culture’s tyranny at the declining end of the prehistoric Pueblo era in the 1400s and to new lives in their current Fourth World