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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment