NYT: In the Mojave Desert, Ancient Signs

In the Desert, Ancient Signs
By STEPHEN REGENOLD
Published: May 26, 2006


(Isaac Brekken for The New York Times)
Flowers bloom among burned Joshua trees in the Mojave National Preserve, where noteworthy findings, including pictograph-packed caves, have been discovered by hikers and amateur archaeologists.

ON the northern border of a vast desert preserve, halfway up a dusty hillside and overlooking a great forest of Joshua trees, David Nichols knelt to brush off a flat gray stone.

"Yep, this is one right here," he said, motioning toward a sheet of exposed bedrock. A group of small, closely spaced stones, like tiny turrets in the sand, formed a vague ring at his feet. "These supposedly kept the rodents out."

Mr. Nichols, one of two full-time research archaeologists employed at Mojave National Preserve, was showing off a recent discovery. On a nondescript hill, a quarter-mile off a four-wheel-drive dirt track, the remnants of a prehistoric way of life lay scattered in the sand.

Throughout Mojave National Preserve, a 1.6 million-acre park about 140 miles northeast of Los Angeles, the subtle traces of a bygone civilization are all around. Pictographs painted on cave walls, dart tips in the sand, shelters, fire rings and pottery shards are common in the area, where generations of prehistoric people lived and died. Indeed, Mojave National Preserve is an amateur archaeologist's dream, with undocumented sites open year-round for visitors to explore in the empty, undeveloped park.

The Drying Pallet Site, as Mr. Nichols has come to call his new hillside finding, features 21 limestone slabs encircled with rocks that were carefully placed hundreds of years ago. The indigenous people, Mr. Nichols told his small tour group, used the sunny protected rock platforms to prepare Joshua tree blossoms....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/26/travel/26mojave.html?8dpc=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1148616176-S2RcIhhxXrvboy07BrOJkQ

I've visited that part of the country....and by God I didn't know there were pictographs there. Guess we better go back...

Thanks for posting.

since i can't read the whole article and learn if they explained it.

dp

"It was dried like beef jerky," he said of the white blossoms, which each spring still daub the land below in one of the world's largest and densest forests of Joshua trees. "Food in the desert was dried for preservation; it was the only way."

i didn't know that, a veggie jerky.

makes sense tho, to find substanence wherever it was available.

dp

you didn't get to see:

". . . slight hill dead-ended at a cliff, and Mr. Nichols stopped to look up. The rock wall above, a gray, disintegrating mass, held a mosaic of tiny dancing figures.

"Wow, look at these petroglyphs!" said Mary Ann Guggemos, a 48-year-old park volunteer from Buffalo. Carved in a veneer of rust-brown desert varnish were the depictions of bighorn sheep, masked human figures and male stickpeople with no necks but fingers and small phallic appendages. Concentric circles dotted the stone. Diamonds, ovals, a square, pits, grooves and other abstract images hovered nearby.

The Pinto House Site, as this find has come to be known, was inhabited by ancestral Mojaves or Chemehuevi, according to Mr. Nichols, and they lived and worshiped in the dusty dwelling. Pottery shards mixed with small stones and animal dung in the dirt. A faint ring of rocks encircled a small shrub. Eleven slick metates, worn stone pallets used for grinding piñon seeds, acorns, juniper berries and other grains, sat under the overhanging rock face. And the assemblage of petroglyphs looked down upon it all.

"The sacred and the mundane were mixed in this culture," Mr. Nichols said, standing beside rock rings and milling stones. He said the etchings above were probably made during a ceremony, perhaps dreams manifested and scratched on a wall. "They didn't go to a church to worship," he said. . ."