Petrified Forest National Park - Prehistoric Melting Pot

Less ancient, but equally mysterious, are the vestiges of prehistoric Indian peoples that dot the hills and knolls. Although Petrified Forest was never a major cultural center, as Mesa Verde was, these high grasslands became a sort of melting pot where three great prehistoric cultures -- the Anasazi from the north and east, the Mogollon from the south, and the Sinagua from the west -- overlapped, and their people intermingled. Little is known of how these folk resolved their differences, but no evidence has been found of warfare between them, and some sites contain artifacts from two or three cultures, suggesting that peaceful coexistence was the rule.

The sites of several communities have been found. The remarkable Agate House, for example, is an eight-room pueblo built from chunks of petrified wood. It may have been occupied for only a short time between about A.D. 1050 and 1300. The Puerco Pueblo, the largest and most recently inhabited of the park's ancient buildings, had nearly 100 rooms of sandstone and mortar in which 60 to 75 people survived the drought that brought an end to many other communities in the Southwest. It was erected on a bluff overlooking the Puerco River, which continued to run sporadically during the late 13th century, when the drought was at its height. Farming collectively, its people raised beans, corn, and squash along the river's natural terraces. The pueblo was occupied until about A.D. 1400, but all that remains of it today are hints of sandstone walls, a ceremonial kiva, some shallow depressions in the earth, and hundreds of petroglyphs carved into low-lying cliffs.

Calendars in stone
It is the mystery contained in the petroglyphs, far more than any of the sites, that piques the curiosity of modern viewers. The rock carvings, dating back nearly to the beginning of human habitation, are everywhere in the park. Painstakingly carved into desert varnish -- the thin, dark patina that slowly forms on sandstone surfaces throughout the Southwest -- they range from childlike stick figures of humans and animals to intricate geometric masterpieces.

Some viewers have said that the carvings have no meaning, that they are aimless doodles left for the sake of leaving marks. Others profess to find religious significance in them or puzzle over them to decipher the sounds of unknown languages. Any or all of these things may be true of some of the petroglyphs. The only certainty is that they are haunting works of art whose significance, for the most part, remains mysterious. However, there are a few petroglyphs in the park whose functions, if not their precise meanings, have recently been learned: they are stone calendars that mark the cycle of the seasons with astonishing accuracy.

One small cave, known as the Cave of Life, though strictly off-limits to visitors, has been shown to be a particularly dramatic example of the way in which these calendars work. The cave has an entrance that faces west, and through that entrance, and through many chinks between the boulders that enclose it, the setting sun sends its rays; and as the season progresses toward midwinter and the sun sets daily a little farther southward, the resultant patterns of light move gradually across the opposite wall of the cave. This wall is adorned with many petroglyphs. One of the chinks shapes the light into a thin dagger, and just before the winter solstice, the point of this dagger approaches a complex pattern of petroglyphs. Slowly, as the sun descends toward the horizon, the dagger moves across this pattern, its point touching first one symbol, then another, until -- precisely at sunset -- the dagger's point comes to rest in the center of an elaborate cross. There it fades to darkness. (The Hopi Indians, believed to be direct descendants of the Anasazi, have a ceremony called Wuwuchim, celebrating the beginning of creation, that starts at that moment.)

Another set of petroglyphs on the cave wall has at its heart a circle, out of which a spiral, like the fiddlehead of a fern, seems to sprout sideways. At the autumnal equinox, and again on the first day of spring, the light of the setting sun floods through the cave entrance to perfectly frame the conjoined figures. (These equinoxes are also ceremonially observed by the Hopi.)

Coincidence? Perhaps. But throughout the park, more than a dozen other such coincidences have been found in recent years. The changing seasons are marked by shafts of light that dart and disappear, flow liquidly down rock faces to end at the centers of intricate spirals, or intersect with lizardlike shapes. Some of the petroglyphs that mark the summer solstice are particularly eerie in their accuracy, for they adorn the faces of rocks that stand alone in the open, and are touched only once a year -- either at dawn or at sunset of the longest day -- by the shadows of nearby hills and bluffs, or by slivers of light that slip through cracks between distant cliffs.

Thus, the land itself was made to serve as a solar almanac, by means of which ancient farmers knew when to sow, when to reap, when to prepare for winter, and when to renew their faith that summer would return. It is an awesome phenomenon -- a testimony to the creativity of a people who devised a method of atuning their lives to the eternal order of the universe.