414 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1936 



said to have been made by men journeying to the Grand Canyon. 

 (See Mary Russell F. and Harold S. Colton, Petroglyphs, the Rec- 

 ord of a Great Adventure, in the American Anthropologist, new 

 series, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 32-37, 1931.) 



The possible meaning of other petroglyphs will be discussed 

 below under "Types of Petroglyphs." 



PETROGLYPHS AS ART 



In some localities, petroglyphs provide the only known examples 

 of primitive art. In evaluating their merits, however, several facts 

 must be borne in mind. First, native Indian art north of Mexico 

 had not, with the exception of certain areas of high textile and pot- 

 tery attainments, achieved either accuracy of form or perfection 

 of execution. Second, rocks offer a resistant medium for carving and 

 usually uneven surfaces for painting. Anyone who has attempted 

 to hammer or scratch a design into granite or basalt with a small 

 rock held in his hand must marvel at the persistence of the ancient 

 artists. Third, it is probable that in most petroglyphs, esthetic 

 motives were secondary to some other purpose. Many of the geomet- 

 ric designs, for example, were certainly not intended to be objects 

 of artistic enjoyment. Some were even placed in dark recesses of 

 caves, as if deliberately concealed from profane scrutiny. Often, 

 where space was limited, figures were ruthlessly drawn over older 

 ones, producing an effect of utter confusion. 



It is noteworthy that practically all of the recognizable pictures 

 are of men, mammals, reptiles, birds, and insects. There are very 

 few fish, virtually no plants. Undoubtedly many pictures portray 

 dwellings and objects of general use, but, excepting certain compara- 

 tively recent petroglyphs, they are either too crude or too greatly 

 conventionalized to be identifiable. 



The artistic merits of the realistic and semirealistic pictures are 

 extremely variable. Human or anthropomorphic beings, for exam- 

 ple, vary from the extremely complex, somewhat conventionalized, 

 and carefully executed masked men or god images of eastern Utah 

 (pis. 3 and 4) to crude linear figures produced with a faltering hand 

 and no real effort at realism in the Great Basin and elsewhere (fig. 1). 

 The latter have neither breadth nor depth, and some had degenerated 

 into mere crosses or crosses surmounted by circles. 



The finest single example of petroglyph art is an elaborate and 

 very elegant group of human beings near Vernal, in northeastern 

 Utah, placed high on a sandstone cliff. The background is carved 

 away so that the lines of the drawing stand out as a kind of bas- 

 relief (pi. 3). 



Other highly stylized local types of petroglyphs are discussed 

 below. 



