If one looks to distant continents, they will see deserts and mountains, many similar to ours. Carved in stone are wildlife figures, some 10,000 years old. The inscriptions celebrate the essence of being – spirit, animal, earth, and sky.
The Gobi Desert has its etched saiga, which survive today as the world’s most northern antelope. Twyefelfontein in the Namib Desert has its ancient carvings of lions and rhinos. At 15,000 feet on the Tibetan Plateau are endangered wild yaks whose ancestors are imprints in rock. What these petroglyphs share are poignant glimpses of species central to people long ago.
North America too has its celebs. Caribou engravings are in the far north, bison etchings from Saskatchewan to the Dakotas and Idaho, a bestiary of carvings echoing the human-animal heritage. In 2016 bison became our national mammal. A national petroglyph does not exist despite protection of cultural resources by the 1906 Antiquities Act.
A petroglyph of a caravan of bighorn sheep near Moab, a common theme in glyphs from the desert southwest
Inscriptions of the First Peoples stretched across the Sonora, Chihuahua, and Great Basin deserts. Mark Maryboy, the first elected Native American as a county commissioner (Utah) suggested some 150,000 archeological sites span Utah’s sacred Greater Bears Ears Area. The Mohave Desert’s Coso Range has 35,000 etchings, most of desert bighorn sheep. California’s Chumash have theirs, as do Paiutes, and many others. Petroglyphs are everywhere – tribal lands notwithstanding they’re on BIA, BLM, USFS, USFWS, NPS, and state and private properties.
Wild sheep were of historic reverence. When Captain Juan Mateo Manje visited the (now) Mexican-American borderlands in the 1700s, horns in Ceson Mo’o were piled high; in the modern Tohono O’odham language, the town’s name means “bighorn sheep heads.” In my fieldwork in central Asia, I’ve seen ibex and Argali horns stacked by Tibetans and Mongolians.
In our American deserts where I conducted my PhD research, bighorns were locally extirpated by the 1970s. More recently, they’ve repopulated some ranges including the Greater Bear’s Ears region – the culturally-significant traditional lands of Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and Ute Mountain Ute and Ouray Ute.
The desert icon now stretches another 150 miles north into the crenelated folds of Utah’s San Rafael Swell. The re-wildling efforts of desert bighorns, known for so long from petroglyphs, are more than trivial thanks to dedicated hunters, non-profits such as the Wildlife Conservation Society, more recently the Denver Zoo, tribal commitment, and state and federal agencies. Yet the path to link past appreciation of animals in life and celebrate them today remains arduous.
Navajo healer and spiritual leader, Jonah Yellowman noted the uncertain messaging of petroglyphs: “The writings on the wall. Somebody wrote it there. Maybe there’s a story. Maybe up to today. Maybe the future.”
The future is here and as Interior Secretary Deb Haaland focuses on environmental protections, opportunities exist to redress bio-cultural challenges which do not cease at statutory borders. Different pressure emanates from the literal explosion of outdoor recreation. Tourists flock to southeastern Utah mesmerized by ancient geological formations, but biological impacts of all that activity are poorly understood. Paragliding, drones, and scenic helicopter flights remain popular, but we don’t yet understand the stress they may cause bighorns—especially to pregnant females. Near Moab, some 100,000 mountain bikers congregate each year. Add countless motorcyclists, jeeps, and OHVs. Cliff-dwelling wildlife are hemmed in from the San Rafael Swell to Arches and Canyonlands – all places where ancient sheep petroglyphs speak to their living descendants.
Today, as Earth’s biodiversity is assaulted, kinder and gentler hands are needed. Petroglyphs connected the human conscience then, as they do now, with animals on every continent. While I do not speak for others, acknowledging diversity amongst the spiritual messages of America’s true first founders is important.
If we wish to pay more than mere homage to our human legacy, we must sustain and support bio-cultural values including the bonds that the First Peoples shared with nature. America has a national mammal. Wouldn’t a national petroglyph enhance respect for Mother Earth and the First Americans who drew inscriptions in stone. Isn’t it time to elevate the telling of these remarkable symbols for future generations at a national level?
Joel Berger is Barbara Cox Anthony University Chair in Wildlife Conservation at Colorado State University.
