Ethicsĭo not move, or take any artifacts found at the sites (or anywhere!)ĭo not touch the art or any artifact: The questions surrounding most rock art cannot be answered yet, but technology is catching up.
Just remember: take only pictures and leave only footprints! Thanks. I will cheerfully show you pieces of pottery and cutting tool flakes all over the ground at some of these sites. We would be happy to show you this cave, and many other sites. This is the first and only place my fellow-guides and I have ever seen this style of native art. Among these perfectly preserved symbols are a few pictograph/petroglyph combinations, where a petroglyph was chipped away and then painted over with a pictograph. In an area we call “The Adventure” a small cave shelters dozens of beautiful pictographs from the rain. Of all the rock art I have witnessed, from the California coast, to Moab, Utah, nothing is as unique as one site that we can actually guide you through. Pictographs, Petroglyphs, and a rare combination of both, in a cave near Saint George, Utah. Throughout these various waves of occupation, tons of evidence has been left behind and much of it survived to be found by modern Americans, thanks to the dry climate of southern Utah. Their long-lived culture is the only one that we can be certain bares its true name, for they are alive to tell us themselves. They were hunter-gatherers who also farmed a few foods: methods that are believed to have been learned from the Ancestral Puebloans. This displacement of such a large group of people allowed the Paiute tribe to move into the area where they still live today. One reason they are so well-recognized is for their mysterious disappearance around 1200-1300 A.D. A few structures built by them are still visible in the area today but most have crumbled. The Ancestral Puebloans settled southern Utah as early as 2,000 years ago and farmed corn, beans and squash along with many other crops. These people are most well-known for their farming and rock-and-mud homes of the American Southwest. The most recognized natives to our area were the Ancestral Puebloan culture, once called the “Anasazi,” a name that is no longer used.
Their traits were found as old as 7-10,000 B.C. Another group that hunted-and-gathered these lands were named by archaeologists the “Desert Archaic” people. There were a few different culture types among these first people, which are categorized mostly by their stone tools, which is nearly all that has survived the eons. This nomadic lifestyle makes it not worth the time to build a permanent home, since you may not live there very long, so fewer artifacts were left by them. These first people were believed to be mostly “hunter-gatherer” tribes who followed/hunted wild animals and harvested wild plants. The dates are constantly debated, but humans have been in the Americas for as long as 12,000-20,000 years. Artifact from the Anasazi State Park museum, Boulder, UT. These black and white geometric patterns are characteristic of the Anasazi art style.