One of our favorite pastimes is wandering about the Colorado Plateau in search of Native American ruins and rock art.  Rock art occurs as petroglyphs, which are pecked (never scratched) into the rock, and pictographs, which are painted onto the rock.

  Carbon-dated artifacts show that the Four-Corners area where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet has been occupied intermittently for at least four thousand years.  Different groups left styles of art as different as a Picasso and a Rembrandt.

  Newspaper Rock, which is beside the road going into the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park, is one of the best known and most easily accessible petroglyph sites.  It contains classic Anasazi* petroglyphs of bighorn sheep and other animals, bear tracks, abstract designs, and anthropomorphic figures.  The figures on horseback are probably Ute or Navajo.  These figures are all pecked through the surface coating of almost black desert varnish to expose the light colored sandstone beneath.

  Except for the horse figures in the Newspaper Rock panel, the youngest piece of art seen here is at least 700 years old, since the Anasazi left this area before 1300 AD.  Some of the pictographs may look a bit faded, but keep in mind than modern science has yet to develop a house paint that won't fade after 10 years, let along after 1000.

  *Yes, I'm well aware of the debate over the proper term for these ancestors of today's Hopi and the pueblo cultures of New Mexico.   Since the Hopi are their direct descendants, I personally prefer the Hopi term “Hisatsinom,” which means “our ancestors,” rather than the derogatory Navajo term “Anasazi,” which means “ancient enemies.”   The archaeologists call them  “ancestral puebloans,” so as to say out of the fight.  But Anasazi is what they are commonly called, so that's what I'll use here.

  Now, continue on and enjoy some of the finest art ever created.