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Utah's Rock Art Enthusiasts Call For Greater Protections

Earlier in October in Escalante, on the edge of the Grand Staircase, the weather was beautiful, but 150 people chose to sit in a darkened auditorium to watch slides of Utah rock art.

 

It’s called the Utah Rock Art Research Association, the biggest and oldest such group, and it’s president, Richard Jenkinson, was one of the presenters at the once a year event.

 

“This is an avocational group of people who are interested in rock art.  It was founded in 1984 by some people who just found a common interest, and it has grown.,” Jenkinson said. “What we try to accomplish at symposium is for people to share what they’ve learned and what they think about rock art.”

 

Another presenter was Sally Cole, a prominent expert who has for the last 35 years studied rock art on the Colorado Plateau. 

 

“Much of the rock art, especially in Utah, a lot of it is at really incredible sites that have really caused us to think about a lot of things. Very complicated, very accessible. You know, it’s right by roads, and it’s right by trails,” Cole said. “It doesn’t make it any more important because it’s hard to get to.”

 

I watch the slide shows of magnificent Utah petroglyphs and pictographs, and listening to the speakers, realize that, compared to archeology, much of rock art study is still highly mysterious and conjectural. Part of the problem, said Cole, is that it’s art.

 

“You know the problem is it got categorized as art in an art gallery, which is a modern European/American approach. What we’re looking at with rock art is a communication system, clearly,” Cole said.

 

Cole represents the now mainstream approach, which is to first try to understand the scores of cultures and clans that created the rock art.

 

“They’re asking really important questions. They’re really putting Native American culture from the point of view of, we have to look at how they look at this,” Cole said. “We need to try to understand the way it would have come out of their traditions and their cultures. These were the ancient occupants of this land, and if we don’t pay any attention to their history, how can we pay any attention to any history?”

 

A sort of opposing epistemology came from Ekkehart Malotki, professor at Northern Arizona University, expert on Hopi culture, and rock art author.

 

“What the images meant to their makers is beyond recovery, and this is true of course for most rock art,” Malotki said. “Only the actual image maker would be able to tell us what they wanted to portray or communicate.”

 

Malotki shared a widespread sentiment at the symposium, that 14,000 years ago, humans came to Utah for the same reasons they do now.

 

“From early hunter/forager to Mormon settlers and today’s river runners, tourists and rock art aficionados,” he said. “One would also hope, of course, that the state of Utah is taking some pride in this imagery, in this location, in this incredible cultural heritage.”

 

To that end, Malotki said many of Utah’s rock art sites should “at least” get on the National Register of Historic Places, and that the Sand Island site at Bluff should be a World Heritage site.

 

“Not a single rock art site in North America is currently classified as a UNESCO World Heritage site,” he said.

 

Moab’s Rory Tyler is among many who believe that, like elsewhere, some Utah rock art signifies astronomical events. 

 

“I got into rock art a long time ago when I found out about Chaco Canyon, but I really got involved starting in 1994 when I moved to Moab,” Tyler said.

 

For the last three years Tyler has documented equinox and solstice events in remote Hell Roaring Canyon. With the aid of local climbers he has discovered several archaic pictographs that seem to mark how the sun interacts with two stone towers and an alcove.

 

“So it looks pretty intentional. Here’s a time-lapse I took the following spring equinox. You see the sun is moving behind the tower. Wham! And that appears for less than a minute, and only from that one spot. So that only happens two days a year,” he said.

 

The Rock Art Association also does tours to different places in Utah throughout the year.

Originally from Wyoming, Jon Kovash has practiced journalism throughout the intermountain west. He was editor of the student paper at Denver’s Metropolitan College and an early editor at the Aspen Daily News. He served as KOTO/Telluride’s news director for fifteen years, during which time he developed and produced Thin Air, an award-winning regional radio news magazine that ran on 20 community stations in the Four Corners states. In Utah his reports have been featured on KUER/SLC and KZMU/Moab. Kovash is a senior correspondent for Mountain Gazette and plays alto sax in “Moab’s largest garage band."