THE PEOPLES BEHIND THE PICTURES

BEGINNING AFTER HIS Air Force service, Martineau drove across the United States, Mexico, and Canada to sketch, photograph, and prepare site maps of rock-writing panels. He documented petroglyphs and pictographs at hundreds of sites across Nevada and elsewhere in North America, taking more than 25,000 photographs. At first he traveled by himself and then later took his daughter Shanan Anderson, who helped him compile eight thick notebooks of pencil drawings of symbols with descriptions as detailed as any prepared by contemporary site stewards.

Anderson remembers driving with her dad from powwow to powwow or tribe to tribe, accepting free meals and earning gas money by selling arrowheads that Martineau carved while sitting on the tailgate of his truck, a curious crowd gathering around him. It was a simple, nomadic lifestyle that culminated in Martineau’s best selling book as well as a 1992 coauthored work titled, Southern Paiutes: Legends, Lore, Language, and Lineage. By the time he died of colon cancer in 2000 at the age of 68, Martineau had become a legend. Anderson, who went on to marry into the Moapa Band of Paiutes, is now working with an artist to publish her father’s notebooks as one large volume, which will enable today’s archaeologists to compare the state of rock-writing panels in the late 1950s to early 1970s with their present condition.

Central to Martineau’s work were the same questions that have perplexed archaeologists and anthropologists throughout time: Who made these rock writings and when? And what were they saying?

There is general agreement that the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation northeast of Reno holds the honors of oldest American rock writing. Researchers think etchings in boulders there are at least 10,000 and perhaps 15,000 years old. They are rivaled by a few Mojave Desert sites in California; much depends on the dating techniques used (more on that later).

One of Kevin Rafferty’s favorite research haunts in Clark County is the Valley of Fire State Park, specifically Petroglyph Canyon on the trail to Mouse’s Tank. Rafferty says the area was used by humans at least 7,500 years ago but was more occupied 2,000 years later by the Archaic peoples, then the Ancestral Puebloans, and finally the Paiute and Patayan cultures about A.D. 1100-1200. Rafferty ventures that the majority of the fresher-looking petroglyphs that contain a large number of representational motifs (bighorn sheep, humans, possible insects) could be tentatively dated to roughly the years 300-1200. The more abstract ones are probably Archaic age (3500 B.C.-A.D. 300). Some anthropomorphs (human-like figures) with splayed fingers and any H-shaped motifs are probably Patayan (precursors to modern-day Lower Colorado peoples) dating from about A.D. 900, while anything that is scratched into the rock as motifs and much of the pictographic (painted) record are likely Paiute, dating from A.D. 1100 forward.

Native Americans originated in Eurasia and migrated across the land bridge linking Asia and North America. Two separate scientific DNA studies from about four years ago showed that ancient populations then spread across the Americas some 13,000 years ago.

One problem with using DNA from bones unearthed in archaeological excavations for genetic studies is that it violates the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, passed in 1990. With that in mind, UNLV anthropology professor Karen Harry could not contain her excitement when talking about upcoming research in Southern Nevada. Beginning about 1500 B.C., the Ancestral Puebloans would extract fibers from agave and yucca leaves and compress them into small wads called quids for chewing or sucking on. The DNA from their saliva is still often viable enough to be sequenced, and use of saliva does not violate NAGPRA. Harry and her graduate students intend to sequence the DNA from eight or more quids collected at a site outside Kanab, Utah, then compare that DNA with other DNA from the same time period in Southern

Nevada to find out whether migrants introduced agriculture or local peoples started farming themselves. It will also help to determine how the Ancestral Puebloans are related to modern tribes.

Beginning about A.D. 750, populations swelled and villages developed, culminating in irrigation systems for growing corn, beans, and squash; large, underground rooms known as kivas that were used for social occasions and spiritual ceremonies; the beginnings of jewelry-making with turquoise and shells; and development of trade routes. Over time, the individualistic worldviews in the early cultures of the Great Basin (comprising the Mojave Desert, Owens Valley, and Nevada) gave way to more collectivist values, says UNLV anthropology doctoral student Manuel De Cespedes. Rock writings reflected this cultural shift, changing from abstract to representational images of humans and sheep.

Shamans (medicine men) were depicted in rock writing as having horns, representing the buffalo and bighorn rams that gave power to them, Anderson says. They held key positions in Indigenous communities and were responsible for most rock writing from about A.D. 50 until collectivist values emerged with larger villages and towns at the end of the first millennium.

Archaeologist David Whitley, who has studied and written extensively about shamanism, says, “In the Great Basin, the chiefs and the shamans were the same people. There you see the position of religious authority is tied to a position of political power.” Initiations into shamanism, traditionally reserved for males, required years of preparation culminating in a druginduced vision. Trances could be brought on by isolation or sensory deprivation, stress from fasting or pain, dancing, or hallucinogens such as jimson weed and native tobacco, “which has eight times the nicotine content of Virginia Slims,” Whitley quips.

He argues that shamans sought out rocks, caves, and water sources at night to enter the spirit world and obtain supernatural powers to cure (or cause) illness, pray for rain, bring about good luck, find lost objects, and battle evil shamans. When dawn broke, they would etch images of their visions on rocks at these sacred sites, leaving petroglyphs in the rock varnish, which is a coating of clay minerals and/or oxides left on the surface by weather over time. The tools used to etch or “peck” through the varnish to expose the lighter layer underneath were hammerstones of quartz or other minerals, knives, or chisels. Quartz was thought to confer supernatural power to the petroglyph because when struck it generates a flash of light, adding drama for onlookers.

As paint for pictographs, shamans mixed hematite for the red hues, kaolin clay for white, and charcoal or manganese oxide for black. To bind the paint after it dried, the artists added plant resins, animal blood and fats, or a liquid such as water. If water was not available, saliva or urine was substituted. Common pictographs were handprints, made during ritual puberty ceremonies for both boys and girls.

Dating A History

ROCK WRITING IS as old as Stone Age cave art found in Europe and Australia beginning about 3.3 million years ago and extending to the end of the Pleistocene about 11,650 years ago. On this basis and also Native American origins in Eurasia, Martineau suggested that if Native American pictography is eventually proven to be identical to the original Old World system, then “it represents the survival of the actual parent system of almost all writing right up until the beginning of our modern era.” In consulting the elders of tribes across North America and studying cryptanalysis, he discovered there was a universal sign language that “overcame the difficulties posed by extreme differences in (spoken) languages. The symbols for passing through, water, in front, and coming down bear close resemblances to movements for such concepts in the sign language,” he wrote.

Given what researchers know about Ancestral Puebloans and their culture, how precisely can they pin down the date(s) of any given rock writing? Not very well — but they’re getting better at it. One limitation is the need to avoid damaging the panels in any way. Also, more than one time period is often represented at a site, though this may sometimes offer clues. One example is the 300 rock writing panels with 1,700 designs at Sloan Canyon in Henderson, which archaeologists believe span the Archaic era to about 200 years ago. Kevin Rafferty points out that on one panel there, a man with a hat is depicted on horseback. It could refer to someone like Jedediah Smith, a hunter and trapper who crossed the territory that is now Nevada in 1827 on his way to or from California. Or, it might reflect the 1776 expedition of Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Garcés, a missionary priest who was the first known European to visit the territory currently known as Nevada.

Identifying a design’s subject matter, such as a man on horseback, is the most common method to date an individual design safely. Horses with riders appear in petroglyphs throughout the Great Basin and California, Whitley says. Bows and arrows, which were introduced about A.D. 500, provide another example. Before that, Ancestral Puebloans hunted with a spear and wooden spear-thrower called an atlatl to give it more momentum. The spear had a conical depression that fit into the hook of the atlatl. A hunter would raise the atlatl over his head in an arc and send the spear off to its target some distance away. Some panels on Atlatl Rock at the Valley of Fire clearly show hunters holding an atlatl, meaning those petroglyphs were etched prior to A.D. 500.

Another nondestructive way to gauge the age of rock writing by relative dating is to assess the condition of a pictograph. If it’s more degraded or fainter than another, it’s possibly older. Although a number of weather-related variables can lead to wrong conclusions, this method is less prone to error if it is cross-checked using other methods.

Whitley and Arizona State University geography professor Ronald Dorn have been using three chronometric methods to date the rock varnish over petroglyphs. Before 11,000 years ago, the environment was wetter and less dusty here in the West, producing a varnish that is now rounded and lumpy. But since that time, the drier, dustier conditions produced a flat or lamellate varnish. To date pictographs, the only method used so far has been radiocarbon-dating of organic matter in the pigment binder mentioned above. Combining two or more relative dating and chronometric techniques has led to more robust conclusions about age.

Past Is Prologue

MARTINEAU’S BOOK HAS been reprinted many times, and as a result he was asked to give talks and consult with several tribes. Anderson says, “He received criticism in the white world because he was a white guy teaching Indian writing and had never attended college. He was put down a lot,

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