• 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

  • World’s Oldest Pots: 20,000-Year-Old Vessels May Have Been Used For Cooking Clams Or Brewing Beer
  • “The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated”: 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest
  • Pizza Slices, Polaroid Pictures, And Over 300 Hats: What’s Left Behind In Yellowstone’s Hydrothermal Areas?
  • The Mathematical Paradox That Lets You Create Something From Nothing
  • Ancient Asteroid Ripped Apart In Collision Had Flowing Water
  • Flying Foxes Include The World’s Biggest Bat And The Largest Mammal Capable Of True Flight
  • NASA Responds To Claims That Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Is An Advanced Alien Spacecraft
  • Millions Of Tons Of Gold Are In Earth’s Oceans, Potentially Worth Over $2 Quadrillion
  • The Race Back To The Moon: US Vs China, Will What Happens Next Change The Future?
  • NOAA Issues G3 Geomagnetic Storm Warning As 500,000 Kilometer Hole Sends Solar Wind At Earth
  • Lasting 776 Days, This Is The Longest Case Of COVID-19 Ever Recorded
  • Living Cement: The Microbes In Your Walls Could Power The Future
  • What Can Your Earwax Reveal About Your Health?
  • Ever Seen A Giraffe Use An Inhaler? Now You Can, And It’s Incredibly Wholesome
  • Martian Mudstone Has Features That Might Be Biosignatures, New Brain Implant Can Decode Your Internal Monologue, And Much More This Week
  • Crocodiles Weren’t All Blood-Thirsty Killers, Some Evolved To Be Plant-Eating Vegetarians
  • Stratospheric Warming Event May Be Unfolding In The Southern Polar Vortex, Shaking Up Global Weather Systems
  • 15 Years Ago, Bees In Brooklyn Appeared Red After Snacking Where They Shouldn’t
  • Carnian Pluvial Event: It Rained For 2 Million Years — And It Changed Planet Earth Forever
  • There’s Volcanic Unrest At The Campi Flegrei Caldera – Here’s What We Know
  • 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