Neolithic Tagging

In Search of Something

We have piles of rocks out here in the desert, lots of piles of rocks. Some of these piles are special be cause they were tagged by the local inhabitants before natural climatic changes made Arizona suck. Well, suck in a subsistence agriculture sense, the original inhabitants moseyed on, died off, or decided to flaunt their reservation status and start casinos. Still scalping the tourists after all these years. But that’s not the point. The point is the paleo-people scritched and scratched on some of the rocks out here. There have been volumes written as to why and what the natives were trying to say, but it is all guesses. Hell, archeologists are still trying to piece together what the cultures were like back then - with so little info how can you get inside their heads to find out what they were thinking, what motivated them, what their belief system (if any) was?

Vandalizing the boulders may have been a spiritual thing, or may have been recording actual events. There well may be a combination of reasons for re-decorating the local landscape.

Some would say the carvings portray visitors from space. Maybe, but if so the visitors didn’t hang about, whether they had an appointment to help the Egyptians with their pyramids, or maybe they were smart enough to see the direction earthlings were headed and didn’t want to leave any fingerprints on that train wreck, they left without a trace. Some out here even believe Jesus toured North America, so maybe they were depictions of his trip, but I suspect space visitors would be a more rational explanation.

I tend towards the spiritual thing. Life was tenuous at best during the dawn of man and humans always need an explanation for things. What better explanation for some new phenomena then a supreme sprit willed it, ergo all is well. Another reason I tend towards the spiritual is the Sioux practice of fasting on top of Bear butte for four days and nights on a vision quest. I was lucky enough to see drawings (on paper) done during some of these early quests and the figures in the drawings are very similar to the petroglyphs out here. Now take into account different people in different situation and an earlier time and I may be way off, but all since is, is best guess- heard that in a movie once.
I doubt we’ll ever have a definitive answer as to why the prehistoric public created the glyphs, they are interesting to look at and in a give a measure of immortality to the carvers.