Imagery - Old - Continued

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Many people are fascinated with history, including pre-history. Making Good Mondays is often about imagery. This post combines the two ideas. It is a continuation of an earlier one here at Making Good Mondays: "The First Photograph." I was inspired by an e-mail from my blog friend "Spadoman," who read the post about the first camera. Spadoman blogs at Round Circle. I commend his piece, "The Real Reason for the Crow Creek Ride," as background reading and to get acquainted with his very fine writing and good soul. Here are portions of his e-mails:

1) The first e-mail, with Spadoman's thoughts and ideas related to my (old photograph) post:

These drawings and pictures on cave walls and rocks are fascinating. I first saw them here in Minnesota. Up in the Boundary Waters Canoe area, a wilderness area that borders Canada, there are places where the drawings can be seen. It takes a lot of work to see them as you pretty much have to canoe to where they are and there are no short cuts. It is a day or two journey to get there from any embarkation point. There is also a place where painting are found on rocks that are not verticle, but rather horizontal on the flat in a place called Jeffers, MN. The Jeffers Petroglyphs: http://www.jefferspetroglyphs.com/

Last year at this time, I spent a week or so with the Havasupai people whose reservation is at the bottom of Grand Canyon. One man I met from down there took me on a ride down a road that runs from the main highway, old route 66, to the Colorado River. It is on reservation land. Along this road, he stopped here and there to show me some things. One of the places was a petroglyph site, undiscovered by tourists, hidden from view on a desolate semi-private road. Pristine viewing of an ancient artform.

Then again, rocks that are defaced by graffiti and initials of those in love, (JS loves BM), or gang signs painted on many types of surfaces might be the petroglyphs of the future. I wonder about this and how these types of things will be depicted by future anthropologists long after we're scattered to dust. The findings of us in the distant future is also a fascinating subject.

Man did leave marks all over. The voyageurs made gashes high up in the pine trees to be seen by navigators on the lake and portage system. The Nez Perce piled rocks along trails to tell the comings and goings of people and which direction they were traveling, these are still found along the Lolo trail from long before Lewis and Clark in Eastern Idaho's Bitterroot mountains. And of course, the trash this string of generations is leaving buried in the ground in landfills and generally just scattered on the sacred earth mother.

2) February 22, 2009. Subject: Petroglyphs. Spadoman added:

Feel free to use anything I sent you. Those canyon wall pictures at the Grand Canyon were magnificent. I was right up close to them. I didn't touch them. There are also some more modern ones at a place in South Dakota called the Horse sanctuary near Hot Springs, SD. http://www.gwtc.net/~iram/

The site doesn't talk about them, but a long time ago, people used the area down by the Cheyenne River for ceremony, (Sweat Lodge, Sundance) and left marks, circles, on the banks of the river and the sandy area along the river bottoms. On some cliffs, they did some carvings into the sandstone. You can see them if you take the tour at the sanctuary. Many amazing places on this Earth Mother.

References regarding petroglyphs - these famous ones were found in caves in France:

1. The Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc.
2. The Cave of Lascaux.
   

As human beings we seem to carry a psychological affinity to old images. Jung described it as the "collective unconscious." I am not sure whether it is also somehow connected to what we might call DNA memory. In any event we are connected to our forebearers from all over the world. We all descend from our common ancestors in Africa, whose traces are lost to history except in fossils. I would love to get a sense of what they did with their earliest impulses towards imagery.


My topical post today at South by Southwest and The Reaction is about politics.

My new blog is called "Behind the Links."

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• The Journals of Lewis & Clark Online (janawillworkforbooks.blogspot.com)