Oct. 22, 2000

EXPLORING COLORADO'S PAST

I spent last weekend out in the grasslands of southeastern Colorado with a group of people helping to document ancient rock carvings.

It's nice to think that when these site reports are officially recorded with the Colorado Historical Society, our names will be attached to them, however insignificantly.

But it's heartbreaking to see how many people gratify essentially the same desire to be remembered by carving their own names over historic petroglyphs.

Or, as one do-gooding vandal inscribed in 4-inch-high letters, "Please do not deface the rock near the pictures."

We were camping in Picture Canyon, on the Comanche National Grasslands.

It's about 35 miles southwest of Springfield, Colo., just north of the Oklahoma line. People who have worked on the glyphs in the canyon planned a weekend to finish up the final details of recording the sites, and invited members of the local Mensa chapter to come along and help out.

The people who organized the weekend are amateurs only in the positive sense that no one pays them for their dedication to this project. They are also experts.

Ann Whitfield, a retired middle-school teacher, handed out our assignments for the weekend. One group went off to be "explorers," checking out the west wall of the canyon for glyphs not yet documented. A couple joined Mike Maselli in surveying and measurement. The rest of us were the verification crew, studying each of the panels that had been previously identified and checking the accuracy of Ann's site drawings.

I break too easily to be clambering around on the rocks, and besides I'm afraid of heights. So I stuck to ground-level stuff. But it was still exciting to compare the drawing of a boulder the researchers call the "star chart" and discover two additional stars. If it is a representation of a constellation -- nobody knows -- one day that may help identify which one.

"What I'd love to know," Ann said wistfully, "is what people were thinking when they did this. What did they want to communicate? But we'll never know."

Picture Canyon is the site of Crack Cave, an astronomical site where the petroglyphs are aligned so they are illuminated by the sun as it rises on the day of the autumnal equinox. Of course we're several weeks past the equinox, and the sun doesn't enter the cave now, but it was still interesting to see.

The authors of the book Archaeoastronomy of Southeast Colorado and the Oklahoma Panhandle, Bill McGlone, Phil Leonard and Ted Barker, believe the inscription is "ogam," an early form of Celtic writing, and that it means "(Sun) strikes (here) on the day of Bel," Bel being the Celtic sun god.

I don't know whether that's fanciful or not, or how or when Celts were carving rocks in Colorado. But the authors have used their translations to locate other astronomical sites, and a theory that makes successful predictions is usually worth a respectful hearing, even if it goes against conventional wisdom. Maybe especially then.

Barker, who ranches near Pritchett, Colo., joined us on Sunday. He remembers that there was very little modern graffiti when he started coming to the area, but that a lot of it was put on in the 1930s. How sad, that some of these carvings have lasted hundreds or even thousands of years and then they're wiped out just as people come to realize their importance.

Even though Picture Canyon is one of the best-known of Colorado petroglyph sites, there's more to find, and the "explorers" in our group earned their title. They found several new panels, including one with a fish and another with a hand. And they relocated a carving of a woman that was attested by a photograph taken several years ago but had been lost. Turns out it was on the horizontal face of a ledge some 15 feet above the canyon floor, not visible from the ground.

The new panels were welcomed by the weekend's organizers with some ambivalence, I fear. It meant more work to do when they thought they were almost done. But they were very diplomatic about it.

I don't see myself spending a lot of time studying rock art, but now I understand better why others find it fascinating. I hope it can be preserved.