PETROGLYPHS— STEWARD 407 



complex in design and so striking in pictography that they readily 

 excite interest. Others represent art and symbolism at its lowliest. 

 Paradoxically, the most interesting are least known. Even in Colo- 

 nial times, certain eastern petroglyphs commanded attention and 

 they have monopolized it until recently. Nevertheless, petroglyphs 

 are far more numerous west of the Rocky Mountains, where the large 

 number of smooth rock faces provided by caves, cliffs, and boulders 

 afforded opportunities for this art and where the semiarid climate has 

 preserved them from destruction by the elements. There is scarcely 

 a mountainside, canyon, or other place frequented by primitive man 

 where some trace of them may not be found. 



SOME COMMON MISTAKES ABOUT PETROGLYPHS 



It is the unhappy lot of science that it must clear the ground of 

 flhnsy and fanciful structures built upon false premises and errors 

 of fact before it can build anew. Probably nothing in the entire 

 field of archeology has produced greater excesses of misinformation 

 than the significance and authorship of petroglyphs. Unintelligible, 

 mysterious, and supposedly occult, they have stimulated a veritable 

 orgy of mad speculation. Surely their primitive makers would have 

 hesitated had they been able to foresee the furor their efforts were to 

 cause. Let us review some of the more common misconceptions and 

 appraise them in the light of archeology. 



Some persons, who cling to hypotheses that were abandoned when 

 archeology became a science, are determined to prove that Egyptians, 

 Babylonians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Chinese and other Old 

 "World peoples reached America long ago. They interpret petro- 

 glyphs as records of trans-Pacific migrations and of strange deeds 

 of antiquity. Others, undaunted by the facts of scientific archeology 

 and geology, spend incredible energy trying to relate petroglyphs to 

 the cultures of those imaginary oceanic cradles of civilization, the 

 •'lost continents" of Atlantis and Mu. Some, more loyal to native 

 soil, have thought that petroglyphs proved that the Garden of Eden 

 lay in America. An amateur expedition, with more enthusiasm and 

 money than scientific training and caution, once spent thousands of 

 dollars in an attempt to show that the rock designs in western Ne- 

 vada were proof that all systems of writing and all civilizations of 

 the world were conceived in these sage-covered valleys. More moder- 

 ate imaginations are content to regard petroglyphs as evidence of 

 Aztec wanderings. 



All of these interpretations are similar in that, reluctant to enter- 

 tain commonplace and common-sense explanations, they first con- 

 coct a story of mystery and glamor and subsequently seek facts to 

 support it. They illustrate a priori, deductive thinking at its worst. 



