424 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1936 



Despite the apparent recency of these petroglyphs, there is no 

 way to know their meaning. Those near Santa Barbara bear a gen- 

 eral resemblance to ground paintings made by some of the Chumash 

 Indians during boys' initiation ceremonies, but it is idle speculation 

 to suppose that this was their real purpose. The strange anthro- 

 pomorphic and zoomorphic figures of the southern San Joaquin 

 Valley were thought by some of the local Indians to have been doc- 

 tors' marks, but this, too, is a guess and need not be accepted merely 

 because an Indian made it. 



Washington and Oregon have a great number of petroglyphs, a 

 good portion of which are painted, but as the archeology of this 

 general region is incompletely known and as the rock pictures have 

 not been systematically studied, it is impossible at present to classify 

 them according to age or area. 



A large number of those which occur in or near the Columbia Val- 

 ley are painted red and seem to be comparatively recent. Many are 

 of human beings, apparently with feathered headdresses, others are 

 of recognizable species of animals, including deer, sheep, and others. 

 Many are strange zoomorphic creatures which may have been "water 

 monsters" revealed to persons in visions or the guardian spirits of 

 fishing places (pi. 12). Some figures even resemble those on certain 

 carved stone and bone objects found in archeological sites and appar- 

 ently dating from the past 200 or 300 years. Some of these have been 

 published by William Duncan Strong and W. Egbert Schenck in 

 Petroglyphs near the Dalles of the Columbia River, in the American 

 Anthropologist, n. s., vol. 27, pp. 77-90, 1925. 



There are many petroglyphs, both carved and painted in Idaho. 

 The geometric and crude realistic figures found among the former 

 are much like those of the Great Basin, to which they may be related. 

 Others, including many that are painted, are of men, horses, and 

 animals and often date from post-Columbian times. Because many of 

 these bear a stylistic similarity to the pictographic writing of the 

 Plains Indians who lived very close to this region, some people have 

 been disposed to interpret them as pictographs. Perhaps many of 

 these were true pictographic writing, but the interpretation of any 

 particular petroglyph should be regarded with great skepticism. 

 (See Richard P. Erwin, Indian Rock Writing in Idaho, in the 

 Twelfth Annual Report of the Idaho Historical Society, Boise, Idaho, 

 pp. 35-111, 1930.) 



Petroglyphs east of the Rocky Mountains are not strikingly differ- 

 ent from those of the west and comprise crude but frequently recog- 

 nizable pictures of men and beasts, many wholly unintelligible geo- 

 metrical scrawls, and the very conunon human and bear tracks. 

 Many petroglyphs in Wyoming, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Colorado, 



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