Written in the Land: the Mystery of Geoglyphs

One of the major projects I have been working on lately involves geoglyphs.  These earthen art designs are found in large amounts in places like Peru (the famous Nazca lines are geoglyphs), Chile, Australia, and the extreme southwestern United States- in other words: where I live. At the museum I am taking in a large collection of aerial photographs by local photographer and pilot Harry Casey, who has been flying over the geoglyphs for over 30 years, photographing changes to the land and the geoglyphs.  As of now the collection includes over 5,000 print and 500 slide photographs, with more yet to be accessioned.  I'm working closely with Harry and his wife Peg, going over images with them, listening to the stories behind the photos and the people who recorded them as well as the theories of the images themselves.  Three oversized images were included in our recent Seaweed, Salmon, and Manzanita Cider: A California Indian Feast exhibit and visitors were amazed- both by the beauty of the images and the fact that most of them had never heard of the geoglyphs. A recent article in our bi-weekly Land of Extremes newspaper series introduced local geoglyphs to a wider audience.

 

Photographing geoglyphs from above shows the images as they cannot be seen from the ground


This Saturday my co-worker and I accompanied Harry and Peg on the next step in our geoglyph education.  We drove to Pilot Knob, Arizona to record latitude and longitude for the geoglyphs found there.  The most famous, and easiest to see, is the Horse.  While some of our geoglyphs have been dated several thousand years old, the horse is obviously a much more recent work, based on its content. Horses have been extinct in the Americas for thousands of years, returning with the Spanish in the 1500s.

Desert pavement

The area around Pilot Knob has desert pavement perfect for geoglyphs, better than the pavement found in my area of the Yuha.  Looking over the rocks on the plateaus by the images we were able to see extensive desert varnish, the orange-red color found on the bottom of rocks that have remained undisturbed for thousands of years.  We were able to see tools scattered across the area: scrapers and choppers as beautiful or more than any in our collection.  Jessica even found some small fossils from when the area was under the ocean millions of years ago.

As tempting as it may be to remove these artifacts, thinking you are protecting them from the elements or other people, it is important to resist the temptation.  Artifacts randomly removed from an archaeological site are removed from their context, removing the story of the area as well as the artifacts themselves.  Take photos or drawings, not rocks.