• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Ancient Rock Art Is Scattered Throughout The Grand Canyon – But You’ll Never Know Where

July 23, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The Grand Canyon is a spectacular sight to behold in and of itself, but did you know the surrounding national park is also home to a wealth of prehistoric rock art? Don’t be disappointed if you didn’t – the exact whereabouts of the vast majority of it remains a closely guarded secret.

Advertisement

Take Shamans’ Gallery, a site that most people would never have heard of were it not for word-of-mouth and later, the Internet. First recorded in 1987 and named by American archaeologist Polly Schaafsma, it features a large panel of rock art paintings – called pictographs – depicting anthropomorphic characters, deer, birds, and other abstract features.

Its style has been described as Grand Canyon or Esplanade Polychrome, the latter after the distinctively red and tan bed of sandstone that forms the canyon and though it can be difficult to precisely date rock art, it’s estimated to date back to the Archaic period, which lasted from around 8500 BCE to roughly 2000-1000 BCE.

Shamans’ Gallery is also nowhere to be found on the National Park Service (NPS) website.

The only way we know about it is through Schaafsma’s descriptions and photographs of the gallery taken by those who’ve managed to find the site. In the latter of those cases, it’s become something of an unofficial rule to not share the exact location, out of respect for preserving and protecting the art.

Officials choosing to keep the location of thus far well-preserved ancient rock art so secret isn’t really a surprising choice given the behavior that some members of the general public visiting national parks display towards their surroundings.

Advertisement

On an episode of the podcast Everybody’s National Parks, NPS park ranger and archaeologist Russell Cash, who works at Zion National Park, describes how out of the over 150 panels of pictographs and petroglyphs in that region, the “overwhelming majority” are not accessible to and are kept secret from the public in order to protect the art.

The one site that is accessible, Cash describes as “the saddest thing that we have here in the park” because “there is more graffiti and vandalism on that rock than any other place in the park.”

Back in Grand Canyon National Park and the nearby Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, there are a couple of locations where the public is allowed to feast their eyes on early pictographs and petroglyphs – namely on the Bright Angel Trail and at Nampaweap – but visitors are urged to keep their distance due to similar issues of vandalism.

“Please don’t touch petroglyphs. When people touch petroglyphs, they leave a residue of body oil on the surface of the rock. Over time, the oil causes images to fade and history is lost,” says the NPS. “Remember petroglyphs by photographing or sketching them, not by making rubbings or tracings.”

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Canada’s Conservatives pledge big spending, deficit reduction in election platform
  2. Evolito’s electric motors look set to take off in aerospace where YASA left off in automotive
  3. TWIS: Newly Discovered CRISPR-Like Systems May Be Used To Edit Human Genomes, Reconstructed Face Of 50,000-Year-Old Ancient Ancestor, And Much More This Week
  4. Can Peacocks Fly?

Source Link: Ancient Rock Art Is Scattered Throughout The Grand Canyon – But You’ll Never Know Where

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • What Is Cryptozoology? We Explore The History And Mystery Of This Controversial Field
  • The Universe’s “Red Sky Paradox” Just Got Darker: Most Stars Might Never Host Observers
  • Uranus And Neptune May Not Be “Ice Giants” But The Solar System’s First “Rocky Giants”
  • COVID-19 Can Alter Sperm And Affect Brain Development In Offspring, Causing Anxious Behavior
  • Why Do Spiders’ Legs Curl Up Like That When They’re Dead?
  • “Dead Men’s Fingers” Might Just Be The Strangest Fruit On The Planet
  • The South Atlantic’s Giant Weak Spot In The Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Growing
  • Nearly Half A Century After Being Lost, “Zombie Satellite” LES-1 Began Sending Signals To Earth
  • Extinct In the Wild, An Incredibly Rare Spix’s Macaw Chick Hatches In New Hope For Species
  • HUNTR/X Or Giant Squid? Following Alien Claims, We Asked Scientists What They Would Like Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS To Be
  • Flat-Earthers Proved Wrong Using A Security Camera And A Garage
  • Earth Breaches Its First Climate Tipping Point: We’re Moving Into A World Without Coral Reefs
  • Cheese Caves, A Proposal, And Chance: How Scientists Ended Up Watching Fungi Evolve In Real Time
  • Lab-Grown 3D Embryo Models Make Their Own Blood In Regenerative Medicine Breakthrough
  • Humans’ Hidden “Sixth Sense” To Be Mapped Following $14.2 Million Prize – What Is Interoception?
  • Purple Earth Hypothesis: Our Planet Was Not Blue And Green Over 2.4 Billion Years Ago
  • Hippos Hung Around In Europe 80,000 Years Later Than We Thought
  • Officially Gone: Slender-Billed Curlew, Once-Widespread Migratory Bird, Declared Extinct By IUCN
  • Watch: Rare Footage Captures Freaky Faceless Cusk Eels Lurking On The Deep-Sea Floor
  • Watch This Funky Sea Pig Dancing Its Way Through The Deep Sea, Over 2,300 Meters Below The Surface
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version