| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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feature Spirited Stories on Ancient Walls Skirting the white alkaline expanse of China Lake on the northwestern edge of the Mojave Desert, a caravan of pick-up trucks and sport-utility vehicles send languorous plumes of dust into the morning sky. Their destination this winter morning is a canyon flanking a small dry streambed high in the Coso Mountains. It is the site of one of the most remarkable concentrations of rock art in the world. At about 5,000 feet, the road ends and the occupants, members of an expedition organized by the Maturango Museum in nearby Ridgecrest, California, emerge. Once we are inside the canyon, the petroglyphs leap out at us. Hundreds of bighorn sheep with curved horns and boat-shaped bodies run with deer, mountain lions, and small dogs. On one particularly stunning cliff face, human-like figures with elaborate headdresses stand with outstretched arms, hands clenching ancient weapons. Since these petroglyphs were first studied almost one hundred years ago, archeologists and anthropologists have puzzled over their significance. As a window upon a vanished society, Little Petroglyph Canyon represents a tantalizing opportunity to look into the minds of prehistoric people, but like abstract paintings, these chiseled images are open to any number of interpretations. The people who carved them abandoned the region centuries ago and left few clues to their meaning. Speculation and controversy fill in the blanks. Within the last 20 years alone, a number of new theories have been advanced, theories based, in part, on new dating techniques and on a newfound willingness within the archeological community to consider different methodologies. But the study of rock art is not simple. It must consider a variety of people, listen to competing points of view, and weigh both certainty and doubt. "Think of the petroglyphs like modern art," suggests archeologist William Clewlow, who has been working in the region since the late 1970s. "The carvings change through time and will change further, and their meaning will change. The best we can do is document them and then document the changing theories about them." Halfway between Death Valley and the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, Little Petroglyph Canyon lies within the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake and is closed to the public. Since 1943, the Navy has used these 1.1 million acres--of which Little Petroglyph Canyon is a tiny sliver--to test and evaluate air-to-air and air-to- ground weapons systems. The Tomahawk and Sidewinder missiles were developed here. Little Petroglyph, together with an adjacent canyon, was dedicated in 1964 as a National Historic Landmark. Today, the Navy sees the canyon not only as an archeological resource, but as a public-relations tool, an opportunity to show the public how well it manages its ward. Its pride is justifiable: the rock art here is perhaps the least vandalized of any in the United States. Only the occasional roar of a F-18 jet breaks the quiet of the canyon. Go back in time though, and the quiet is displaced by the roar of water pouring out of the glaciers that gripped the Sierra about 12,000 years ago. Back then Owens Lake to the north was brimming, and an even larger lake--twice as big as Lake Tahoe--covered the China Lake region. The first inhabitants found their way here perhaps following huge animal herds--bison and antelope, and maybe horses, camels, and mammoths--across a verdant savanna. They left behind, as evidence of their existence, choppers, scrapers, and projectile points. As desolate as the region is today, it is a perfect place to study a prehistoric culture. These sites, preserved in the dry desert air, are miles from the alluvial debris flows that have buried most of the other locations. It is quite possible to find manos still in the metates (pestles in hollowed stones) as if the people who lived here had just walked away. "No place in North America has such an unrealized and untapped potential," says Clewlow. No place, he insists, has such a chronology--from late-Pleistocene mammoth-kill sites to nineteenth-century ghost dance sites, from dry caves to house rings, from petroglyphs to painted art. "There is no aspect of North American archeology that isn't there. It is the best bank [of ancient artifacts] that California has for learning the prehistory of the New World." When archeologists first saw the petroglyphs, they could only guess their age. Crude approximations were made based on imagery. A carving of a man with a bow and arrow was assumed to be more recent than that of a man holding an atlatl, because that spear-throwing device is a much older weapon than the bow and arrow, which anthropologists believe arrived in the Cosos about a.d. 500. Today, more precise dates have been determined by scratching through the surface of the rock itself. Beneath a thin accretion of oxidized dust, iron, and magnesium that has hardened on the surfaces of these rocks, is a layer of organic material--lichen, charcoal, fungus, pollen, or plant remains. By capturing and dating the organic material--presumably new when the carving was made--scientists, using the new technique of accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating, have dated some of the art at about 12,000 b.p. (before present). One researcher, Ron Dorn, a geomorphologist from Arizona State University, believes some petroglyphs in the Cosos date back 19,000 years. Obviously, a controversial finding. The age of the petroglyphs, however, tells only a fraction of the story. The rest, drawn from archeological excavations scattered throughout the Cosos, reveals a complex social organization subsisting in what became an increasingly difficult and arid environment. As the snow and rainfall here diminished, animal herds disappeared, and there was a significant shift as tribes grew more dependent on gathered and stored resources: hunting became less important than foraging. Most archeologists believe this lifestyle change is the most compelling story about the people of the Great Basin. The nomadic life that hunting required was replaced by settlements and villages, and this transition is reflected in the rock carvings. "We're dealing with a non- agricultural lifestyle that is preserved in the desert," says David Hurst Thomas, the curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "The Cosos are important because of that. These people walked very lightly on the land and survived a long, long time." The Lone Pine Indian Reservation, about 65 miles north of China Lake on Highway 395, is home to about two hundred Indians, most of whom have Shoshone blood and generational ties to this region going back more than two hundred years. Linguistically, the people who inhabited the Cosos were early ancestors of the Numic-speaking Shoshone and could be classified as Proto-Numic or Proto-Shoshonean. They took part in a widespread migration out of the Cosos about 1,000 years ago, populating a large portion of the western United States. Today, local Shoshone tribes in California--the Monache and Paiute, the Panamint and Timbisha Shoshone, the Kawaiisu and Chemehuevi and Tubatulabal--see the Cosos as the center of their world, their place of origin. Coso means "land of fire," a reference to the area's ancient volcanism. It was the products of volcanism--hot springs and obsidian deposits--that originally drew people to these mountains. The springs, believed to be the origin of life, played a role in cures, and the obsidian was used for stone tools. Some sites are still littered with numerous chipped debitage, the by- products of stone tool making. Sandy Yonge is Paiute-Shoshone-Mono. Ask her about the petroglyphs and their meaning, and she'll tell you nothing. "Rock art is sacred," she says bluntly. "It's not for the public all over the world to come in and make it their business. The canyon is a sacred place for my people to know, not for anybody else." Though unwilling to talk about the petroglyphs, Yonge and her 70-year-old aunt, Dorothy Joseph, share their feelings about the Coso Mountains more freely. "Oh, the area is significant all right," she exclaims. "It's where we were all derived from. It was the center of our life--when this whole valley was full of water before our grandparents' time." An earlier generation was not so reticent to talk about the petroglyphs. In 1935, Mark Kerr, an Irish immigrant who lived in Independence, California, put together a 90-page compilation of Shoshone customs, legends, and folk history. In one section of his manuscript, he writes about the rock art. Shoshone residents of Darwin, a nearby mining town, told him that the carvings were not made by Indians: ... but by a baby or something like a baby called Pah or Oh; some of the old Indians saw the baby write on the rocks. When they saw the baby, they did not live very long. Sometimes the rocks bawl like a baby. That is why the Indians know it is the baby Kerr writes that the rock art, according to legend, was still being made. At night, the Shoshone heard spirits tapping on the rocks as they rode through the canyons, and the next day, they would see new work. Only spirit artists, they added, could carve petroglyphs on cliffs too high to be reached. "Wherever there is any Indian writing," another informant said, "there are Indian burial grounds close by. When the Shoshone people feed the spirits, they are feeding the dead. If you don't do this, you'll dream about them every night." The petroglyphs dramatize differences between the Native American perspective, which sees the art as part of its heritage, and a more Eurocentric point of view, which sees it as an opportunity to learn more about a prehistoric people. But getting behind the veil of mystery that surrounds rock art--spirit-artist explanations notwithstanding--is no easy matter. "It's a tough thing to get your arms around," admits Thomas. "[Rock art] tends to attract dilettantes who come in and read a message into it. Interpretations of the past are okay, but in this case, eccentric interpretations have devalued the currency of rock art among professional archeologists." Thomas is referring mostly to Harvard professor Barry Fell, who has suggested that North American rock art was created by Celtic seafarers and monks who came to this continent centuries ago. Another equally disputed claim comes from Erich Von Daniken, who in his 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, presented a case that rock art came from extraterrestrials, a theory that is still popular in some circles. With more questions being asked, fewer answers coming to light, and sites being ruined by development and vandalism, about 80 amateur and professional archeologists met in New Mexico in 1974 to create a forum for the study and conservation of rock art. Today the American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA) has nearly five hundred members. The creation of ARARA came at an important time in modern archeology. Four years earlier, the California state legislature had passed the California Environmental Quality Act, which required developers to produce an environmental impact report on any new project. Money suddenly became available for archeologists and graduate students to study and excavate sites that might have been ignored by museums or universities, and rock art began to be studied in less traditional--and perhaps more adventurous--ways. This new openness mirrored a deeper change that was taking place within the archeological community. In the 1960s and 1970s, according to Thomas, archeology had become "self- consciously scientific," dominated by white-coat lab scientists who studied excavated food remains and settlements. "Most archeologists thought that issues of subsistence and settlement were the only objective facts you could deal with," he says. "Getting at meaning was something you could not do as a hardcore scientist." Post-modernism changed that. This new ideology questioned scientific authority and welcomed new voices. In archeology, it gave credibility to explanations based on symbolism and Native American traditions. Rock art studies were also given a significant boost. "The archeological community has come to realize that there is room for all types of archeology," said Meg Conkey, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. Conkey argues a case for cognitive archeology, an approach that tries to answer "why"--why, for instance, certain foods were important and why some sites were holy. In answering these questions, cognitive archeology lies somewhere between the data-dependent methodology of the 1960s and more interpretive approaches." It is, she claims, "the most substantive way to show the rich symbolic lives of the people." "These people were not just staggering around the landscape looking for the next meal," she says. "They had relationships to each other, to the land and to the spirit world. An archeology that tries to come to grips with meaning lets us appreciate that they were human beings after all--people who saw themselves in the world and how they passed this knowledge around." One of the leading proponents of cognitive archeology in the study of rock art is David Whitley. As a doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles, in the early 1980s, Whitley admits he never got too excited about potsherds and the remains of stone tools. Influenced by the South African archeologist David Lewis- Williams, whose 1981 study of southern African Kung! Bushmen, Believing and Seeing, is one of the most important books on rock art, Whitley spent two years studying at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and wrote his dissertation on the rock art of the Cosos. In describing his approach to cognitive archeology, Whitley begins with the written accounts of Indians' lives. To be a good archeologist, he will tell you, he had to first become an ethnographer.
He pulls down two titles, The Mariposa Indian Wars 1850-1851 and Ethnography of the Yokuts. After studying turn-of-the- century accounts and oral histories from local residents, Whitley was one of the first archeologists to argue against hunting magic--one of the most widely accepted explanations for the petroglyphs. Archeologists who first visited this region believed hunters had carved images of their intended game as a way to improve their fortune. But too few game trails were found here, and there is little evidence that bighorn sheep, the most common motif in the canyon, played a major role in the Indians' diet. Subsequent interpretations included puberty rites, fertility rites and healing ceremonies. Whitley, however, disputes most of these ideas. While not attempting to explain all of the art in the canyon, Whitley focuses on the majority of the art that was made over the last eight hundred years. He sees that Little Petroglyph Canyon was a place of power, not unlike other geological formations revered by Native Americans for their magical potential (Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming is one of the more celebrated ones). The power associated with Little Petroglyph Canyon and the Cosos, he says, was the power to control the weather. According to Whitley, rain shamans visited the canyon to gain the power to control wind, thunder, lightning, and rain. Their visits were a type of a vision quest, in which the shaman sought a dream or a hallucination to acquire a particular power. The visions were abetted by either ingesting a mind-altering drug, like native tobacco, by fasting, or by sleep deprivation. The rock art is a record of what they had seen in those altered states. Carved swirls and honeycombed patterns are common within the canyon, but so are bighorn sheep. In a 1994 article in The Journal of World Archaeology, Whitley draws a connection between the rain shamans and the bighorn sheep, a connection he discovered while reading a 1936 account of shamanism by Isabel Kelly. "It is said [by Indian informants]," Kelly writes in this obscure paper, "that rain falls when a mountain sheep is killed. Because of this, some mountain sheep dreamers thought they were rain doctors." Killing a bighorn sheep should not therefore be taken literally. The death of a bighorn sheep is symbolic, a metaphor for acquiring the power to control the weather. At this point, Whitley departs from the ethnographic record and speculates on why rain making and weather control were important to the people of the region. It was a power, he explains, that played a role in maintaining order within the tribe, an order that was threatened by the increasingly inhospitable environment and, particularly, a drought that hit the region about a.d. 1200. As the people grew more dependent on pine nuts and other gathered resources, they began to see their livelihood tied more and more to rainfall. The shift from hunting to gathering--an activity reserved exclusively for women--threatened the tribal patriarchy, especially the shamans, who responded by using their rain-making activities to preserve their dominance. This way, without their work, the women would have nothing to gather. Bob Bettinger, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Davis, takes a more traditional approach to archeology, one based almost exclusively on excavations and material evidence. He believes that the canyon is a portrait gallery in which individuals, but not necessarily shamans, could assert their position within the tribe by carving images. While he admits that Whitley is something of a maverick in the field, Bettinger still appreciates his work. "The models I work with are like Everyman plays," he says. "There are no individuals. The players are like puppets doing mechanical kinds of things. Cognitive archeology suggests that we should start to think about individuals and individual motivation." Little Petroglyph Canyon may not present the clearest view of the past. But spend a winter day in the canyon, and you'll see that its magic remains strong. The study of the past may ultimately become an epistemological question: How can we trust what we have come to know? But here in the present, surrounded by the basalt walls, the power of the place is still palpable. "Rock art can become an obsessive study," admits Clewlow. "Once you get into it and the more you know, the more you want to see the carvings again and again. Every time a new idea comes up, you want to go back and see how it applies, because you didn't have those glasses on before. Think of rock art as kinetic art. It's nothing static." As a visionary art, rock art's greatest power lies in its ability to confound, puzzle, and mystify. Follow the ebb and flow of time in these mountains, and realize that at one time, this was home, a place where people faced their greatest fears--their own possible extinction. A holy man's sacred records--or a hunter's skillful carvings--reflect that disappearing life, the sporadic rain showers, the scattered herds of sheep, and in the face of that fear, they adapted, leaving behind a valuable record of their experience of their world. |
summer 1997
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