They Seek Answers to Mysterious Geoglyphs

When Harry Casey took over the family farm, he committed himself to a life ruled strictly by the sun and seasons. For occasional escape from this routine, Casey pursued hobbies such as flying and photography.

It was while he was taking pictures of wildflowers in the desert that the alfalfa farmer noticed circles and other shapes that appeared to have been deliberately scratched into the earth. Casey wondered who put the pictures there, how long ago and why.

The answers came in a night class in archeology at Imperial Valley College in the late ‘70s. Casey, now 55, learned that the deserts of California, Arizona, Nevada and northern Mexico are dotted with geoglyphs, large-scale ground drawings of humans, mazes, waterways, snakes and other symbolic figures that were made by people who lived from 500 to 10,000 years ago.

The instructor was Jay von Werlhoff. Where Casey is methodical, Von Werlhoff is intuitive. The archeologist has flowing white hair; the farmer keeps his own locks trimmed and tucked under a baseball cap. Von Werlhoff has been married for 15 years and has two grown sons by an earlier marriage. Casey is single.

The two men were very different, yet, in Casey, Jay von Werlhoff found an accomplice for his work. And Casey found a passion. Using Casey’s skills as a pilot and photographer, the two set out to document every known geoglyph--as well as new ones they discovered--throughout the Southwest.

“Each of them contributes their different talents to the operation,” said Boma Johnson, a Yuma, Ariz.-based U.S. Bureau of Land Management archeologist who also studies geoglyphs. “Jay is the one that comes up with the interpretation and Harry comes up with the photos.”

Though archeologists have studied individual groups of geoglyphs in the past, no one has previously attempted a study of this scope. There are famous geoglyphs in Nazca, Peru, which have been well-documented, but the collections in Australia and the United States have not attracted much attention from scientists, according to Von Werlhoff, 63.

San Diego-area archeologist Emma Lou Davis pointed out the need for documentation of the ancient earth drawings when she wrote of one figure in a 1983 paper: “It is as sacred as Westminster Abbey and as complex as Stonehenge. It is equally in need of respectful study and preservation.”

One morning recently, Harry Casey and Jay von Werlhoff towed Casey’s Beechcraft Debonair out of a private hangar at the Brawley airport. Casey uses the Beechcraft for long-range exploration. For slower, lower geoglyph scouting, he pilots a Piper Cub. At his own expense, Casey has flown more than 600 miles over the last seven years in pursuit of geoglyphs.

Once they were in the air, Casey and Von Werlhoff looked down on a desert scarred with modern earth etchings. There were irrigation ditches, geometric farm plots, circular targets on a WWII bombing range, dirt roads and off-road vehicle tracks.

All these random designs made the appearance of the first recognizable geoglyph that much more startling. Tucked between two dry hills, far from a town or major road, it was a smiling face, 100 feet in diameter. The face was brought to the attention of the researchers by a flying mortician. Many geoglyphs have been discovered accidentally by miners, rock hounds and outdoor recreationists, said Von Werlhoff; and one major find was made by a border patrol pilot on duty.

The smiling-face geoglyph, however, is a fake, Von Werlhoff said as Casey expertly circled the site.

There is no precise method to date geoglyphs. So in some cases archeologists must rely on clues such as climatic and geological changes, figure content and tools and pottery found nearby to determine whether the find is authentic. The modern content made it immediately clear to Casey and Von Werlhoff that the grinning face had not been designed by ancient people.

Airborne Searches

Casey does most of his work in the air, flying overlapping circles and spirals above sectors of the desert in search of geoglyphs. Because of their scale--they range in size from 25 feet to 475 feet--the figures are difficult to spot initially from the ground. Once Casey discovers a geoglyph, Von Werlhoff returns to the site by car. He measures and studies the geoglyph, making sketches of it in his field book.

Floods, droughts, erosion and the passage of time haven’t seemed to harm the figures, which were made by scraping away darker stones on the surface of the earth, revealing lighter soil beneath. (Rock alignments, another sort of ancient earth drawing also found in the Southwest, are figures outlined in rock.)

In recent years, dune buggies and dirt bikes have taken their toll on the venerable artworks. Casey and Von Werlhoff hope to finish recording the geoglyphs before any of them are erased permanently by vehicle tracks. To protect them from destruction, the Bureau of Land Management has fenced some major geoglyph sites. When he has time, Von Werlhoff also builds fences around unprotected geoglyphs.

A Special Effect

Casey guided the plane over a cliff above the Colorado River where there was a geoglyph--genuine this time--of a giant human form. The figure’s legs were cut off by the edge of the cliff, giving the appearance of a man falling into the river below. Von Werlhoff said this effect was intentional, and that the figure might be a “courage building device” depicting the demise of an evil being who existed in Mohave Indian legend.

Most of the geoglyphs in this particular area were made 500 to 1,000 years ago by tribes such as the Mohave, Cheneheuvi, Quechan and Kumeyaay. A few current members of those tribes have been willing to share information about the geoglyphs with Von Werlhoff, but none of the Indians he has contacted claim to know who made the figures, and most will not discuss their function.

“These are sacred to them and they don’t like to talk about them,” Von Werlhoff said. “They have to get clearance from the elders before they can say anything.

“Archeologists have been asking Indians about them for years, but they mostly claim they don’t know anything,” he added. “The Mohaves say, ‘Man didn’t make them, gods made them.’ ”

Von Werlhoff said it was the job of the shaman--the tribe’s “spiritual specialist”--to design, build and utilize the geoglyphs in order to contact powerful spirits, entreating them to “end the drought, replenish the animals, start rain, stop rain.” Common tribe members were left in the dark about such matters.

Where the meaning of geoglyphs has been obscured by secrecy and reticence, Von Werlhoff is willing to fill in the blanks. He draws on intuition and studies of other primitive societies to help decipher the symbols.

“I’m not conservative,” he said. “I try to make my interpretations reasonable and support them with evidence, but sometimes there is just no evidence.”

Casey, on the other hand, said, “I wouldn’t venture a guess as to what they mean. I’ve looked at the glyphs long enough, but quite frankly, I simply don’t know, and the Indians that made them are gone.”

Possible Reasons

Casey lists an array of possible reasons for the geoglyphs’ existence, refusing to give greater weight to any theory. Among the possible purposes: ceremonial, mythological, territorial, celestial observation, hunting magic, burials, habitation sites, and doodling.

Yet in a three-volume book he’s writing on geoglyphs, Von Werlhoff sets forth very definite theories about what the ground figures signified to the people who made them.

At least one popular book and numerous sensational articles have proposed that geoglyphs are so large because they were intended to guide UFOs to earth. (Among his collection of legitimate newspaper and magazine articles on geoglyphs, Casey has one with the headline: Astronomer Discovers UFO Spaceport in California.)

Though they still run into people who are convinced extraterrestrials had something to do with building the geoglyphs, Von Werlhoff said the figures are actually aimed toward the sky because the shaman was directing a plea for protection to the outer world, or the heavens, where great powers were believed to live.

Just as human history was forever altered by the discovery of tools and--later--fire, Neanderthal man took the human race still another step forward 100,000 years ago when he stumbled on the concepts of fertility, renewal and resurrection, said Von Werlhoff.

A Collective Will

Once these ideas were introduced, the impulse to assure survival of the tribe became even more important to ancient people than the individual will to survive, he said.

“This is what turned man to art,” Von Werlhoff said. “This is really what put the human quality in civilization. It’s the most profound idea man turned up--this need for continuation, continuity. The idea of history and the future all comes from that.”

The 300 geoglyphs Von Werlhoff and Casey have documented are expressions of a people’s urge to protect future generations in a changing and hostile environment, the archeologist said.

In the last 11,000 years, the desert became increasingly arid. Many families and at least one entire tribe (the Halchidoma) who relied on the protective power of geoglyphs died out.

Their makers may be gone, but the spiritual power of the figures is considered by some Indians to be still active. Von Werlhoff said that some modern-day Indians continue to visit the remote geoglyph sites out among the spiny ocotillo and creosote bushes. And one Indian told the archeologist that he’d never physically traveled to the geoglyphs, “but my spirit has been there.”