The Rocks Cry Out

In Florida we had a list of places we wanted to go. All we had to do was look at the list and pick a place and then go. In California, for some reason, we never made a list, although we always intended to. There we were often content not to go out and about so we didn’t need a list as much. Here in Arizona, we have made a list. Party, this is because there is just so much stuff to see here (Amerindian, wild west, mining-related, metropolis) and partly it is because we don’t want to “waste” any of our days here by just lounging around the apartment. Since we have been back from Louisville, we have been someplace or another every day that Maya has had off. We get up, look at the list, pick a place and go. We really have this system down by now.

On 19 October we went to the northwest corner of Greater Phoenix to the Deer Valley Rock Art Center. This is a tumbled-down pile of very dark rocks that are covered in petroglyphs. There is a small interpretive center and then a trail through the petroglyph area with signage and several viewing tubes that direct your view to certain striking glyphs. There are 1571 documented glyphs on the hillside made over a period of at least 4,000 years. They were formed by scraping or pecking off the dark, dusty, oxidized surface known as desert varnish to reveal the lighter rock underneath. (Pictographs, which are often confused with petroglyphs, are painted onto the surface of rocks.) There are many recognizable images among the Deer Valley petroglyphs such as deer, hands, spirals, and human figures, but their meaning is enigmatic at best.

The thing that we found most memorable about the site is that everything seemed to repeat the message that there is no way that modern scholars can know what the carved shapes mean. They can guess and they can theorize and they can compare the shapes to motifs and stories still in use among native peoples but they can’t know what the original meaning was. A deer or a spiral might mean one thing to a modern Hopi or a Pima, but that doesn’t mean that it meant the same thing the person who made the mark on the rock 2,000 years ago. Context is everything and we don’t have that. We only have the petroglyphs. The site is considered sacred to several native groups and they still periodically perform ceremonies there. Of course they don’t know the meaning of the glyphs any more than the Ph.D. people do, and for the same reasons. The main conclusion everybody has is: “this place was special to various people for a very long time and that makes it special to us too.”