Watchers of the Sky

Moab, Utah

I recently went hiking in eastern Utah with my daughters, Ursula and Isadora, to a canyon hidden from the broad plain which holds Moab’s southern stretches by a series of high stone bluffs. A stream runs through this canyon, strong flowing and flushed with water during this unusually wet summer here on the northern edge of the Colorado Plateau.

Parowan Gap

I have been to this canyon several times before and had always followed a trail downstream, but on this journey, I decided to go upstream, walking along a jeep road instead. The scenery was marvelous – high sandstone mounds and cliffs, moss covered seeps, cottonwoods, vast expanses of sage, and the ever present juniper. A falcon flew overhead, and now and then jackrabbits dashed across the path.

To our delight, we discovered a broad waterfall plunging about fifteen feet down a stone ledge. But even more exciting, there was a series of pictograph and petroglyph panels stretching about 100 yards along the clear faces of a high sandstone bluff. I am always thrilled to find ancient Indian rock art that is new to me, but one panel in particular drew my attention, for it held astronomical images that were remarkably similar to those found in Parowan Gap, about 300 miles to the west.

Parowan Gap

One of the most important petroglyph sites in the American Southwest, Utah’s Parowan Gap is a deep, V shaped cut or pass in a volcanic ridge that separates the Great Basin Desert from the mountainous western reaches of the Colorado Plateau. This cut is perfectly aligned so that its eastern opening directly faces the rising sun on the Summer Solstice, and its western opening the setting sun on the Winter Solstice.

A millennia ago, the Fremont Indians, named for the explorer who discovered their artifacts, used Parowan Gap as an observatory, documenting the cyclic patterns of the sun, moon, and Venus in hundreds of petroglyphs carved in the stone faces throughout the cut. The Fremont, who created this visual record of astronomical and mythological data, were contemporaries with the Great House Anasazi of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and the mound builders of Cahokia, the vast civilization centered on the Mississippi near St. Louis. However, being more dependent on hunting, the Fremont dwelled in humble villages of brush houses or single-story stone structures, directing their potential architectural energies into religious ceremony and extensive petroglyph sites like those at Parowan Gap.

Parowan Gap

To find Parowan Gap style images on the other side of Utah demonstrated that the Fremont possessed a remarkable cultural continuity. Here in this hidden canyon near Moab, I found a rectangular set of 13 lines and a shaman figure holding a wheel with thirteen sections. Both are probably calendars depicting the thirteen “month” lunar cycle. There was also a small solid circle within a larger circle. 

Anthropologists believe that similar images at Parowan Gap represent the sun at solstice. And most exciting, there was a star shape next to a crescent moon, an image that appears in a number of petroglyph sites in the American Southwest and is thought to represent the supernova in Taurus, which burst forth in 1054 C.E. and appeared next to the crescent moon at its height.

Turning from the petroglyphs, I could see that from this spot, there was a clear view of the sky to the east and northeast – a good place to observe the position of the rising sun, moon, and Venus, since the stone mounds and bluffs create distinctive shapes to note where the celestial orbs had emerged from the horizon.

We were standing at the very site where a thousand years ago astronomer-priests measured the skies and recorded its rhythms in images chipped out of the darkly varnished stone face. Peering up at the blue skies, one could feel the passing of centuries, and the eternal round of the heavens.

Postscript

Parowan Gap

The petroglyph panel near Moab that I describe above is close to a popular jeep trail, and a large section of it has been nearly destroyed by graffiti and defacement. Unfortunately, the section that is nearly obliterated holds Archaic Indian pictographs, which are quite rare and may be 4,000-5,000 years old. Therefore, the excitement I felt at discovering the Parowan Gap style petroglyphs was tempered by a feeling of deep sadness at the tragic and widespread destruction of American Indian artifacts in the Southwest and beyond.

Essayist Barry Lopez brilliantly expresses the depth of this tragedy in his essay “The Stone Horse,” found in his collection Crossing Open Ground (Vintage Books, 1989): “The vandals, the few who crowbar rock art off the desert’s walls, who dig up graves, who punish the ground that holds intaglios, are people who devour history. Their self-centered scorn, their disrespect for ideas and images beyond their ken, create the awful atmosphere of loose ends in which totalitarianism thrives, in which the past is merely curious or wrong.”