Desert Field School

Coyote Mountains 

Monday we spent the day exploring the Yuha Desert with Steve Lucas, an archaeologist and member of the Kumeyaay (the local Native American tribe).  He was showing us some of the geoglyphs that can be found in the Yuha and explaining some of their significance to the Kumeyaay.  It was a beautiful day, we learned a lot and had a great time.

Off roading in our Jeep we found some of the ancient trails made by the Kumeyaay over time (perhaps centuries), as they traveled from place to place depending on the changing seasons.  While there were plenty of other off road wheel tracks from vehicles, there were a few places where we could find the wider tracks made by tanks during World War II.  This area was where Patton and his troops trained for the deserts of North Africa and we’ve found several artifacts in our collection but this was the first time we’d seen tank tracks.

Off-roading and World War II tank tracks

Geoglyphs are earthen art made by Native Americans by tamping down the earth in a particular pattern.  Here, most of those geoglyphs illustrate Kumeyaay legends: the creation of the world, good and evil coming to mankind, etc.  Cairns and other rock formations are joined with the geoglyphs to recreate star patterns or mountain ranges or act as spirit breaks.  One pattern we saw shows the Milky Way and Pleiades constellation.  I was very interested in this idea since most of what I know about cairns and earthen/stone formations and spirit breaks comes from the Celtic tradition, which focuses on myths and crossing worlds, but does not try to recreate the land or stars.  There’s probably a thesis topic in that thought somewhere, but I’ll leave that to someone else to try.

The geoglyphs we looked at were all fenced off as the government’s way of managing and protecting them.  Only one had a sign to tell you what you were looking at, and that sign was more focused on explaining that geoglyphs are damaged by motorcycles and off-roaders and so are fenced off.  It left us wondering: is that the best way to protect the sacred geoglyphs?  Should they be kept secret as the best way to preserve them or talked about, maybe even used by the Kumeyaay again?  Is there a point in saving them if they are no longer in use? After all, isn’t the point of something being sacred that it is used/visited and continues to connect people to their ancestors and religion?  If you fence them off, should you put up more signs to educate the people who see them as a way of helping to promote respect and knowledge of the local peoples? 

Square geoglyph, possibly showing boundary lines

At the Yuha geoglyph another question came up: the question of erosion.  The earth is taking back the land the geoglyph was formed on, and eventually between wind wiping away the patterns and erosion crumbling the earth itself, the geoglyph will be gone.  What do you do about that?  Anything?  Nothing?  Who decides?  The land is managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the federal government.  Do they decide?  Do the Kumeyaay? 

Fossilized clay from the ancient ocean bed, today the Yuha Desert

One of the interesting things about the Yuha is that you can pass huge areas of ancient clay beds that remind you the whole area used to be an ocean.  It’s hard to imagine as you look around today how different the area looked millions of years ago.  I learn different things about the land, the plants, and the rocks every time I’m out in the desert with someone.  Hopefully some of it sticks so that the next time I’m out I can read the story of the desert a little bit more.  As someone who grew up in New Orleans, a land of no rocks, I’ve developed a whole new appreciation for them.  While I can’t read them as well as Jessica and most of the other people here, I hope I’m developing an eye for the rocks and the trails and the stories they have to tell me.  There’s no telling what I’ll learn next.  And that’s a great part of the adventure.

Yuha Desert on the other side of the Yuha Geoglyph