Column: Discovery of hidden drawings puts Poway Native American art in a class of its own
A unique style of Native American rock art has been detected on boulders in Rancho Bernardo and Poway.
“These designs don’t exist anywhere else in North America,” concludes Greg Erickson,a rock art expert who has studied and published papers on his findings in peer-review journals.
His analysis followed development of computer software by mathematician Jon Harman. Called DStretch, it has been used by NASA to enhance images on Mars taken by the Curiosity rover and has revolutionized the analysis of early Native American rock drawings.
Erickson photographed numerous boulders on private property in Rancho Bernardo, especially along Green Valley Creek. Drawings of the Kumeyaay Ipai people had been previously identified there over the years by researchers Malcolm Rogers and Ken Hedges. Erickson took pictures of faint images and photographed boulders with no apparent art. The computer-enhanced digital analysis brought out unknown aspects and rich details in the faded images originally drawn in earthy red ocher (iron oxide). To his delight, they revealed undiscovered artwork on surfaces that appeared blank.
“I found as many as six, seven or eight new painted boulders at some sites,” Erickson said. All were located in what had once been tribal “villages” or habitation sites.
Unlike most Native Americans, the Kumeyaay Ipai did not draw representational images of hunters or deer, mountain lions and other wild animals. They created geometric patterns — diamonds, circles, uniformly spaced parallel lines, zigzags, cross hatching and rectilinear motifs. Dubbed as the Rancho Bernardo Style by Hedges, they’re beautiful designs that Erickson says are unlike any others discovered elsewhere in California or North America.
The meaning and origin of the artwork, thought to date back 500 to 800 years, remains a mystery because there was no tribal written language. Speculation holds that the drawings are likely spiritual or religious in nature, perhaps created by shamans, who kept the meanings secret.
Erickson, who is president of the San Diego Rock Art Association, has been invited by the Rancho Bernardo Historical Society to share his findings at 11 a.m. this Saturday at the history museum located in the Bernardo Winery. His free presentation is open to the public. Unfortunately, that will be one of the only places someone can see the art.
The boulders painted with Rancho Bernardo Style drawings are not on public land. All known sites are on private property, where permission is needed for access, says Erickson, a retired professor of reproductive medicine at UC San Diego. There are examples of Native American rock paintings in the Anza-Borrego Desert accessible to the public but these drawings are not in the Rancho Bernardo Style and are attributed to the Kumeyaay Tipai people.
“DStretch has taken the (rock art) world by storm,” says Erickson, noting that an app is now available for mobile phones and tablets so analysis can be done in the field. It is credited with recent discoveries of hidden paintings at Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Valley of the Kings in Egypt — and much more is sure to come.
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