Native American rock art

The Rochester panel.

The Sego Canyon panel.

Detail of the Sego Canyon panel.

These beautiful photos were taken by Kirk Robinson, who writes this about them –

The pecked images, such as the Rochester panel, are called petroglyphs; and the painted ones, such as the Sego Canyon panel, are called pictographs.  Originally, many of the petroglyphs were also painted.  They may have also been decorated with feathers and other natural materials.

There is obviously a lot of meaning in these interesting figures, but it is hard to know what they mean.  Sometimes you can tell what individual images represent – desert bighorn sheep being the most common of the petroglyph figures in most of the West, but also deer, bears and birds, etc. – but other times they are mythical creatures or spirits that combine body parts from more than one animal.  Some look like images of prehistoric animals.  Others…