Rocks of Ages

Deeply etched spider webs. A bear paw with seven claws. And everywhere, bighorn sheep, thousands of them.

Just a three-hour drive from the place now known as Los Angeles, in a 1,200-square-mile patch of the Eastern Sierra’s Coso Mountains, ancient inhabitants meticulously carved more than 100,000 images onto lava rock walls, crags and boulders.

Today, the Navy is just as relentless in bombarding the surrounding desert. High-powered lasers lash the hills. Missiles obliterate surplus Army trucks. Yet, oddly, if the China Lake Naval Weapons Center didn’t exist, many of those fragile etchings might not either--and visitors might not have the opportunity to encounter this once-sacred site’s anachronistic allure.

Each spring and fall, the Navy temporarily puts its mayhem on pause, lifts security restrictions and allows a handful of guided tours into Little Petroglyph Canyon, with its constellation of figurines that is part of the greatest concentration of Indian rock art in North America.

‘People go to Egypt to visit the pyramids, but here we have a 15,000-year-old history right in our backyards,” says Dave Whitley, former chief archeologist at UCLA’s Institute of Archeology and co-author of “Coso Rock Art, a New Perspective” (Maturango Museum, 1998). “It’s so rich, complex and massive--a fabulous way to get at what Native Americans were thinking.”

Armed with new technologies, Whitley and other archeologists are harvesting untold secrets from the bighorn sheep, geometric patterns and mystic symbols that Native Americans etched with quartz tools. Recent innovations in cation ratio dating have estimated some petroglyphs at this “world-class archeological site” as being 14,000 to 16,000 years old. That would make them the oldest known rock art in the New World. It would also offer compelling evidence that humans have been residing in North America much longer than previously estimated.

New discoveries in the earliest ethnographic records of Native Americans, primarily oral interviews by anthropologists in the 1880s, also have led to new interpretations of the petroglyphs. Scientists now believe that the art was carved primarily by shamans, or holy men, who by fasting and ingesting tobacco experienced trance-like visions that linked them to the supernatural. The sheep carvings, scientists now suspect, concerned not hunting but rain.

“The bighorn sheep was viewed as an animal spirit-helper with supernatural rainmaking power,” Whitley says. “The religious belief was based on the natural phenomenon of watching sheep descend from higher altitudes to eat plants on the desert floor before and after rains. The bighorn, therefore, became a harbinger of rain.”

The stark symbols are providing scientists with insights into everything from climate changes to the prehistoric migration patterns of hunter-gatherer cultures. Shamans from all over the Great Basin--Utah, Idaho, Oregon and Nevada--are believed to have traveled to the site to carve graphic metaphors as a prayer for water.

Even now, the canyon has a certain magnetism. On a recent morning, about 50 people, led by a tour guide from the nearby Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, form a caravan and drive 40 miles across the base--past telescopes, satellite dishes and roads to ammunition dumps--and up into the Joshua trees and wild buckwheat of the volcanic highlands. Finally, the group descends into Little Petroglyph Canyon, a fractured, corrugated lava-rock corridor about a mile and a half long, up to 50 feet across and 30 to 50 feet high. A cluster of shaman figures, some with whirlwind heads, soundlessly demonstrate an ancient ritual. A two-headed sheep stares from a rock. Atlatls (spear throwers) stand poised on the walls. Quietly, the group wanders the ancient holy place, pondering the cacophony of meaning in the stone images.

“You look at some of these 10,000-year-old figures and realize life is short,” says Mike Schutten from Highland. “We’re only here for a brief time,”

“It’s like being in a cathedral,” says Jane Olsen of Rancho Mirage. A well-guarded cathedral. To reach this sacred ground, developers, taggers or vandals would have to dodge bombs and military police. And so, a site that spawns high-tech tools of destruction cradles a rich, creative legacy. If that’s ironic, archeologists and petroglyph aficionados seem not to mind.

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WHEN: Through June, the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest is conducting daylong tours on weekends. Regular tours cost $20 per person. Reservations are mandatory.

WHAT TO BRING: A lunch, water, sunscreen, sunglasses and sturdy boots or shoes. A car with ordinary clearance.

INFORMATION: Telephone the Maturango Museum, (760) 375-6900.