Ancient Petroglyphs: Reading the Stone Art of the American Southwest
alyzza may
The American Southwest—spanning Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado—is home to one of the world’s most dense concentrations of petroglyphs . Unlike pictographs, which are painted onto the stone, petroglyphs are pecked, carved, or abraded into the "desert varnish" (a dark patina of manganese and iron oxides) to reveal the lighter rock beneath. These images were created by various cultures, including the Ancestral Puebloans, Fremont, and Hohokam , spanning thousands of years from the Archaic p