Pictures in Stone – Petroglyphs in America that you can visit with your family
When I first set out to write about my family’s travels, I had no idea just how many of our trips would include archeology of some sort or another. I knew that I wanted to visit places like Chichen Itza in Mexico and Petra, Jordan, with their impressive monuments and long history, but I didn’t know how many smaller archeological sites there are, scattered around the world ready to be explored.
Some were ancient monuments and tombs, but many of the most curious were little more than pictures carved into a rock face. These were petroglyphs, some of the most accessible archeological features you can find.
What are Petroglyphs?
Petroglyphs are, at their most basic, a type of rock art formed by intentionally carving or scraping a rock’s surface. In fact, that’s what the word Petroglyph means! It comes from the combination of the Greek words petro, meaning ‘stone’, and glyphe, meaning ‘carving.’
Petroglyphs have been found all over the world, and the earliest examples have been dated back more than 40,000 years. That’s all the way to the Neolithic era!
Of course, just because petroglyphs are one of the earliest-known art mediums doesn’t mean that any petroglyph you find is ancient. Native American petroglyphs found in the United States are significantly newer than those in places like Iran or South Africa, and there are modern-day artists creating new petroglyphs today.
While the methodology for making petroglyphs remains fairly consistent, several different kinds of petroglyphs can be found worldwide.
Petroglyphic Cupules
Cupules are the simplest, and most common, kind of petroglyph and can be found in stone faces across the world. Cupules are round dimples in a rock surface created by repeatedly pounding a tool into that surface.
To be considered a cupule, they must have been intentionally made by someone and not have a non-artistic purpose or be the result of some other useful process, such as holes made while grinding seeds or entertainment, like in the game of Mancala.
While cupules can be found all across the world, archaeologists usually aren’t sure of the reasons behind their creation, though they are usually thought to be traditional, religious, or artistic marks.
Petroglyphic Engravings
Petroglyphic engravings are what most people think of when they’re talking about petroglyphs. These are patterns and images etched into stone. These can be images of people hunting animals or images of celestial events, but they could also be much simpler patterns or swirls.
Early archaeologists dismissed many petroglyphic engravings as simply being an early form of graffiti, but today it is thought that many of these engravings are actually religious in nature and may have been carved by local shamans.
Some engravings are also thought to record actual historic events, and in Southern California, there are petroglyphs recording the first sighting of a European ship in 1542!
Inscriptions and Hieroglyphics
Technically speaking, stone inscriptions are not considered to be petroglyphs even though they are created in exactly the same ways. Where inscriptions are primarily pictures, inscriptions are composed of letters and words etched into stone faces.
Likewise, despite being primarily picture-based, Egyptian hieroglyphics are not considered petroglyphs because they are used as an alphabet-based form of writing.
How were Petroglyphs made?
No matter what kind of petroglyph it is, the general technique for creating it remains more or less the same. At its most basic, it’s a technique similar to how modern artists use a hammer and chisel to shape stone today.
The artist would use hard rock shards as the chisel and another rock as the hammer and scrape away the outer layers of rock in whatever pattern they wanted. Using a stone as a chisel allows the artist to be much more precise in their work as compared with just using a single stone, which is important if they want to create recognizable shapes and patterns. However, in the case of cupules, it is quite possible that a single tool was used instead.
Check out this video on making petroglyphs for more detail!
Are there any ancient petroglyphs near me?
Petroglyphs can be found on every continent except Antarctica, and while some places definitely have higher concentrations than others, you can most likely find some near you.
In the United States, petroglyphs are traditionally associated with the American southwest, and the easiest to visit petroglyph sites are concentrated there. However, that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck if you’re in the east!
In fact, the first time we showed our kids petroglyphs was at the Track Rock Petroglyph site in Blairsville, Georgia!
Petroglyphs you can visit in the USA
National Park, Arizona
National Park, Utah
There are tons of amazing petroglyphs that you can see in America! Many of them are located on protected lands, like in National and State Parks, but there are loads more hidden away on private land, especially in the eastern states where rock art appears more often in caves.
I personally loved checking out the petroglyphs in Petrified Forest National Park, but there are sites worth visiting pretty much everywhere!
I used the Wikipedia list of Petroglyph locations in the USA to make this map of places they can be found, but I am 100% certain that this list is not exhaustive. If you don’t see a location near you on this map, it is well worth doing a little digging, because you are almost sure to find Indigenous rock art somewhere nearby!
What other kinds of Rock Art exist?
While they tend to be some of the oldest rock art pieces to survive until today, petroglyphs are only one of the different kinds of rock art out there.
Pictographs
In many ways pictographs and petroglyphs are similar. After all, both art forms are essentially ancient pictures on a rock wall. The difference is in how the pictures are made.
Petroglyphs are carved into the rock and depend on a difference in color between the rock’s layers to give it definition. Pictographs, on the other hand, are made by painting pigments onto a rock’s surface.
Megalithic Monuments
Another major form of rock art is the creation of megaliths, or large rock structures. Some megaliths are single, large rocks that were intentionally erected, while others can be composed of several rocks placed in a pattern.
Petroglyphs are one of the most common types of archeological sites that you can visit, but they also remain one of the most interesting. They are like signs from the past, telling us about the people who lived before us and are some of the earliest examples of artistic expression in existence.
On top of that, they are often found in amazing locations that are worth visiting on their own!
