Rock Art Revelations? Some experts have concluded that the earliest Americans produced rock art, and these ancient works reveal their creators were more diverse then previously thought.
Larry Benson
By Alexandra Witze
This petroglyph located near Reno, Nevada is an example of the Great Basin Carved Abstract style. Researchers have concluded it’s somewhere between 10,500 and 14,800 years old.
When Larry Loendorf decided to hunt for ancient rock art on the southern Great Plains, he went about it methodically. Loendorf, an archaeologist with Sacred Sites Research in Albuquerque, New Mexico, made a list of sites containing lots of projectile points and other Paleo-Indian artifacts dating back many thousands of years. Then he narrowed the locations to those containing outcrops of basalt, a hard black volcanic rock that can withstand weathering american archaeology
and thus preserve images that were carved or pecked into it. That put Loendorf along the Colorado-New Mexico border, near the towns of Trinidad and Raton. Finally, he hiked through the rocks, looking for images of mammoths and other Pleistocene beasts. Loendorf never found any mammoth art, but in 2006, at the Piñon Canyon Maneuver site in southeastern Colorado, his team discovered several petroglyphs that were so heavily
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