The Oldest Rock Art

Hello everybody, Ben Woodruff here with Oddjinks Museum and in today's video we are going to be learning about Barrier Canyon style rock art which is a very incredible style and has some unique history and some unique attributes that a lot of people don't think about but actually really matter. So in general rock art people have been doing rock art for thousands of years all over the world. Now rock art is a catch-all term. If you're being more specific there's petroglyphs these are when somebody has pecked into the rock and chiseled through the patina down to the lighter colored stone underneath to have kind of a bit of a contrast there. And then there's pictographs which are painted. In general pictographs are more rare especially in the American southwest we see far more petroglyphs than pictographs. Now pictographs when they are painted you don't just go to the store and buy paint you have to buy earth pigments that will last and then you mix that typically with granulized boiled hide glue. You mix those together and that is a glue that's going to last and that is why some of these have lasted so well. But it takes a lot of work and with most cultures throughout the United States we definitely see more petroglyphs pecked into the than we do pictographs. Barrier Canyon is the exception to that rule. So that's the first thing Barrier Canyon style is almost exclusively painted. I don't even know of any definitive depiction that is attributed to the Barrier Canyon style that is pecked into the rock. It's all painted so that's very unusual. Second of all it's all painted basically red. You might have bits of white to kind of accentuate things but it's it's typically red red ochre and then they're almost exclusively humanoid figures. Now we don't know what these beings being depicted are. We don't know are these depicting people? Is this something oh when somebody dies that they're put on? Is it something really casual? Is something realistic? Are these deity figures? Are they spirits? We don't know but we know that there we would classify these as hominoid figures meaning they're kind of like they're shaped they seem like a human like an if they're either a human or an anthropomorphic human. Now some of them seem to have like uh horns or headdresses. Now these could be a person wearing a headdress or this could be some sort of a spirit or a deity figure that has those as part of their body. We don't know but the shape is basically anthropomorphic so they're either human or at least humanoid. Now that usually comes very late when people have rock art. Normally people will have rock art and the first thing they do is they depict the world around them which is animals because animals you're hunting animals and you're trying to keep from being hunted by animals. So like the oldest rock art that we really have is in Chalvis Cave, France. Arguably it's the oldest it's about 34 to 40,000 years old and it depicts all these animals of the ice age. It depicts you know woolly mammoths and cave lions and and uh you know giant bears and and all kinds of of you know wild horses, woolly rhinoceros, all these amazing animals and that's almost all that's depicted. There's really no actual human depictions in there. There's a couple that kind of there's not a full human but it shows part of the female anatomy and it's kind of uh believed to be sort of a fertility type figure but for the most part they're just like it's all animals and that's really what we see all over the world. The earliest oldest rock art is almost always depictions of animals. The Barrier Canyon style is a very strange exception. It is among the oldest rock art that we have in the North America. Now there are older depictions here and there of woolly mammoths. I've visited some of these but they're not attributed to a specific style. It's like somebody during the ice age depicted a woolly mammoth and that's just kind of that. And so we don't know much more than that. Barrier Canyon probably dates back about 7,000 years. It's just is there's a lot of debate on how old the style is but you know a few thousand all the way to seven eight thousand and some people even say ten thousand years ago. We know that there's artifacts that have been found at some of these sites that are at least dating back 5,000 in some cases 7,000 years. You know artifacts at the site that you know are connected but the strange thing is almost exclusively all Barrier Canyon depicts is almost exclusively humanoid figures. There is occasionally kind of some zigzags and very rarely a few animals but that's almost all there is. And these figures are haunting. They're incredible to see. When you see them if you ever get to experience them they hit you different. They feel like they're really speaking to you really connecting to you in a way that almost seems metaphysical. And I know just rock art just people depicting things in the past but it hits differently. I've been seeing rock art all around the country my whole life and every time it's a Barrier Canyon style it kind of it almost speaks to you and I'm being very serious about this. Last time I visited some there are some other people and I pointed that fact out to them was their first time seeing them. They had seen other styles and they're like yeah it is it's like you almost there's there's some sort of a strange connection. They seem ghostly. They seem different. They seem very strange very unique very special. These are the style that if you look around that some people have attributed to having something to do with aliens if you which I'm not suggesting that but I'm just saying because it's so different and because it hits you different and because it seems so ghostly these people do sometimes try to attribute these somehow as having something to do with alien figures. Not likely but I guess you got to be open to the possibilities right. So the fascinating things about these again are the fact that it was so old and that normally you would assume and in other areas this does happen that people evolve their artistic styles evolve and you can see a progression you can see how it changes not this this this is the style it's going and then bam it just disappears and in this region the next thing is suddenly you have the Fremont people and the ancestral Puebloan people and they are depicting people all over the place with people people people people hunting bighorns and they're obsessed with bighorn sheep uh there's always bighorn sheep everywhere more than anything else and people hunting bighorns people walking around bighorns and there'll also be some other animal depictions you'll have elk and deer and even antelope you'll have all these different pictures that are just all over so it's more of a regular worldview as one would expect it's more of hey yeah this is kind of our way of thinking we're people living in a world we think about us we think about the animals around us and that's what you see with the Fremont and the ancestral Puebloan people which is give or take around uh 180 to about 1300 AD then after that uh it goes locally around here to uh the Ute, the Goshute, Shoshone, Paiute and Navajo and their rock art is again even more of what we would expect somebody might do today their thinking is way more close to modern thinking so it's like ah there's people and they're riding a horse and they're hunting a buffalo and they've got a shield and it seems more like what a person would do to depict a modern scene so these shifts are very abrupt we do not see in the southwest United States we do not see a gradual progression or evolution of the styles of rock art we just see this barrier we see a couple here and there weird things like here's a woolly mammoth maybe and here's maybe another mammoth and then bam barrier canyon you have this barrier canyon style then it abruptly stops we don't know why we don't know if there was something that in the area drove people out or what happened and then next thing you know is boom suddenly you have Fremont and the very strangest thing is they don't usually overlap over each other there's some exceptions like I was at a site the other day and you can see all these Fremonts with these you know trapezoidal you know human figures and the Fremont almost always will have like a male and a female figure next to each other they pair them off uh which is interesting because the Fremont also would make clay figurines of like a male and a female partner put them together wrap them in leather and wedge them in a in a crack in a cliff you can imagine what that means you'll make who knows maybe it's a blessing of a couple who knows but so we very much see these trapezoidal type figures in the Fremont and we see them paired up but uh we but and we see an over obsession and a fixation on the iconography of bighorn chief and at this site you can see where up above you can see some of these uh barrier canyon style red uh figures and then you can see the Fremont kind of overlap them a little bit but again just around the corner is this other big old huge panel and you have a few Fremont uh pecked in pieces down below but not much so ironically what we see is people seem to for the most part leave the barrier canyon style alone there's like oh you know this is this different we're not gonna we'll we'll we'll make rock art near it and maybe overlapping on the skirts of it but we're not going to mark on it where later groups would all the way up to unfortunately modern graffiti or even people in the 1800s you know putting over and you had that you had through historic times for about the past five to seven hundred years tribes would overlap but still always seems like there's something different kind of spooky and cool very special very unique about the barrier canyon style and for the most part both ancient people and the more modern historic people for the most part did not leave a mark over it which actually is very normal if you look in other parts of the country and other parts of the world if there's oh here's a panel oh here you leave your your mark you chisel yourself and oh 100 years later some other tribe and they do it as well and it just builds and builds and builds and builds you have it in ancient egypt where you have ancient egypt hieroglyphs and then you have people come on ancient greek visitors do there and more modern people more modern people just people kind of leave their mark and build it up but for some reason people kind of hesitate fortunately and for the most part leave the barrier canyon stuff alone so it's a very unique style and it's very strange that out of the blue it almost always just depicts humans or humanoid figures and it's painted which again those are the two things that usually come later depicting humans and painting usually comes later in the progress and development of rock art for people but they hit the the most advanced stuff right off the bat it's kind of strange kind of beautiful so i wanted to share this because this is uh you know the hutching museum is here in utah and we almost exclusively find this rock art style here in utah it's very unique it's very special if you ever get out there and go to chance to see it please don't don't touch it just take pictures don't leave your mark don't ruin it leave it for future generations it's been potentially around for as long as 10,000 years so let's leave it up for for a lot longer and be able to appreciate it for the future so i hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about this very unique style of rock art and i hope that you will come visit us at the museum we're at 55 north center street in lehigh utah and always remember that life is a gift so never stop learning and never stop exploring we'll see you next time