The other day I came upon a roadside kiosk with brochures made by local people about the history of Colorado’s West End. One about petroglyphs ended up on my dashboard. This morning I left the confluence, followed the road by the puddles that remain of the Dolores, and found my way to a deserted gallery of rock etchings where the Paradox Valley ends in stacks of red sandstone.
These images of cloven hooves start me thinking. To a hunter who tracks these animals for dinner, a deer or antelope’s foot shape is a salient anatomical detail. But if I asked everyone I know for a drawing about deer, I wonder if I’d receive even a single hoof print. In that sense these drawings are interesting because they capture their creators’ particular perspective with its particular distortions. Take the example of deer again:
Even though the body proportions are wrong, the drawing’s indexical meaning is clear to me many years later in a different civilization. The neck and head are stunted, the tail pokes out at an odd angle, the legs stick out from an inflated torso like cartoonish bird feet. But we’re looking at a picture of an ungulate.
For some reason the human-like figures resist the application of the same logic. This is what I mean: it’s obvious to me that the deer-like petroglyphs are supposed to be pictures of deer. Why is it harder to say that the human-like drawings are drawings of humans?* Sure, the proportions are distorted, but in the same way as the deer’s: inflated torso, shrunken sticklike limbs and head. I was willing to make the jump with the deer drawings but not the humanoid ones. Maybe this has to do with head shapes on the humans, the weird protrusions that could be exaggerated hair and ears but look insect-like. I’m not the first person to imagine aliens, despite the fact that I don’t think aliens would look like this.
Maybe it has to do with the difference between the idea of a deer versus the idea of a human. I’ll admit the humanoid drawings show the idea of humans just as well as the deer-shaped drawings convey the idea of deer. But the idea of a deer, to me, is just a deer. The idea of a human can be much more — a whiff of humanness opens the door to a bulging cabinet of the supernatural. That’s why I can see these strange figures with long torsos and tottering legs and helmet-heads as aliens or gods or ancestors. Except for this one.
Only a regular guy would have that hairdo.
The motifs repeated most often in these petroglyphs give a crude sense of what was on their authors’ minds: deer, sheep, human-like figures, animal tracks and squiggly lines. These artists were drawn to animate things, to motion. I find this notable in a place dominated (nowadays) by near-stillness: canyons, mountains, sandstone and plants. There must have been plenty of things to draw, but the range of subjects is limited to just a few. What’s even more curious is that the style of the drawings is limited, too. If you asked five different people to draw deer, humans, and squiggly lines, you could expect to get five sets of somewhat unique drawings, even if the artists were all in the same family. But the drawings here all follow the same template.
Does this mean all the glyphs were done by one prolific artist? It seems unlikely. Was there a kind of school that trained everyone in the same style? Should we imagine that everyone turned in similar drawings because they not only belonged to the same family, but also were working in the same room, falling back on the same cultural reference points, even drawing on the same sheet of paper?
The other odd thing about the similarity between all these petroglyphs is that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of experimentation.** Even if our family were working in the same room at the same table on the same sheet of paper with the same television blaring in the background (so to speak), I would expect some drawings to stray from the pattern — someone still learning the technique or trying out a zany idea — especially if children were involved. But maybe expecting experimentation makes an incorrect assumption about human nature. Maybe the drive to do things in new ways is culturally transmitted. Maybe creating petroglyphs was not a casual enterprise and barriers to entry ensured they would all look similar. Original thinking is difficult today; perhaps it was even harder before the Information Age inflated the amount of novelty available to humans every day of our lives.
Maybe more variety is out there, on other rocks. But the possibility of sameness is more interesting. I wonder if a slab of sandstone in Arizona somewhere has similar renderings of the same motifs I’m looking at right now in the Paradox Valley. It would mean that either 1) the petroglyph people were profoundly unoriginal artists; 2) this style of glyphs was a part of Culture in their society as widespread as TikTok or standup comedy or religion in ours; or 3) the petroglyphs aren’t art at all, but something more akin to writing, a common symbology meant to be read by strangers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to read this language? What would it say?
*The brochures and the tourist kiosk all used the same language of “human-like” in reference to the figures in the petroglyphs. It’s possible I am subconsciously following their lead, but at the end of the day somebody was the first to doubt the humanness of the glyphs, and that’s what interests me.
**Maybe it just takes a better eye or more experience to see that I’m wrong.