But still we ask, what does the rock art mean? Unlike the story of the cliff ruins, fairly coherent to archaeologists, we know little of the significance of this ancient work. Perhaps it was only doodling of a sort. A bunch of Stone Age deer hunters sit in camp day after day with nothing to do (the game is gone), telling lies, chipping arrowheads, straightening arrow shafts with their dough-nutlike straightener stones. One of them, wanting to record his lies for posterity, begins to chisel the image of a six-point buck on the overhanging cliff wall. I killed that animal, he boasts, with my bare hands.

Another liar takes up the challenge. I killed six bighorn rams, he claims, in this very canyon, only fourteen years ago. And he tallies the total on the soft sandstone with a hard-edged chunk of agate or basalt or flint.

These shallow scratchings may have been the beginning. Inevitably the power of art took over. Most hunter-warriors were artists. They had to be. They made their own weapons. A weapon, to be useful, has to be well made. A well-made weapon or any well-made tool, when crafted by hand, becomes a work of art.

Perhaps the rock art was created by specialists. By shamans and wizards, evoking sympathetic magic to aid the hunt. Portraying a deer slain by an arrow, the medicine man would believe that his wishes would serve as efficient cause in producing the desired result. Imitative magic: life imitates art. Thus the pictographs and petroglyphs may have had a religious denotation, hunting being central to any hunter’s religion.

The art served as a record. As practical magic. And as communication between wanderers. Water around the next bend, a certain zigzag sign might mean. We killed eleven bighorn here, only two hundred years ago, says a second. We were here, say the hunters. We were here, say the artists.

What about the spectral forms—the ghosts, ghouls, gods? Supernatural beings are fished from dreams. From the caves of Altamira to the base of Ayers Rock in central Australia, all original, aboriginal people have believed in the power of dreams. In the Dream Time, say the wise old men of the outback, we made our beginning; from the Dream Time we come; into the Dream Time, after death, we shall return. The dream is the real; waking life is only a dream within a greater dream.

These are speculations. Only a few anthropologists, like New Mexico’s Dr. Polly Schaafsma, have given the Indian rock art serious attention. Most have observed the drawings, recorded them, but made no further study. At this time there is no method known by which the pictographs and petroglyphs can be dated accurately; dendrochronology (tree rings) and the carbon-14 technique cannot be applied here. Nor can the art be correlated with other archaeological data—cliff dwellings, burial sites, the various styles of pottery-, basket-and toolmaking. In the absence of verifiable scientific information, the interpretation of rock art has been left by default to popular fancy: thus the early and premature labeling of this art as a form of “writing” or “hieroglyphs.” Not surprising. The first reaction of anyone seeing these strange pictures for the first time is the naturally human: what do they mean?