Encountering the Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs in the Valley of Fire

(Third in a series on the petroglyphs at The Valley of Fire)

My notes here are but observations, across the centuries and cultures.  They capture how these works stuck me and are in no way meant to perport to reveal what these images meant to those who rendered them.  I’m approaching them as if they where images encountered in a dream.

It’s “as if” this grouping is presenting a picture of a cosmos and identifying a strategy for continued existence.  At first I couldn’t figure the antlered animal, looking to me like an African antelope.  Leaving the park I learned that desert big horn sheep still inhabit the area, a fact that didn’t figure into my sense of that animals range. The value of the sheep is clear and they are presented as a herd.  The snake is vivid as well, the one to the top of huge perportion, much like the scale of the two none human beings to the lower left.  These are the deities.  The spiral seems to keep the tribe in right relationship to the herd of sheep.  The dots seem to both connect and divide different areas of the image.  The comb shape strikes me as both peculiar and important. At first I thought it might be a type of counting system, but the way they are positioned, and the power of the repeating lines make me think otherwise.  These seem a bit like oppositional forces, because that are drawn against other things.  The comb on the left against a snake, the comb in the middle against the tribe.  Below the tribe is a box with a cross.  It is large and seems to be the tribes bundle, or wealth, or possessions.  Then the figures of the tribe or clan.  They hold hands, perhaps in dance, perhaps in travel.

I sense that this picture tells a story, perhaps even a specific incident, but I’d like to think of it without temporal ordering or narrative structure.   Simply put, it tells me that living in this harsh expansive environment depends upon recognition of the forces larger than the human scale,  avoiding the dangers, the continued abundance of the sheep, and above all, tribal unity.