A Rock-Solid Way of Recording History

Even after 14,000 years the place still sends imaginations soaring.

Just ask Gordon Hull to stand beneath the slate-gray cliff, tightly close his eyes and tell you what he sees and hears.

He visualizes a campground at the base of the cliff where groups of people are quietly cooking the evening meal. On a ledge above them, a solitary, transfixed figure is methodically pounding with a rock to gouge an intricate design onto the wall. The rhythmic tap-tap-tap is echoing across a pond formed by rocky outcroppings.

Hull is at Little Lake--a spring-fed oasis 160 miles north of Los Angeles that sits amid North America’s largest concentration of Indian etchings known as petroglyphs.

Thousands of them cover the volcanic escarpments next to the tiny freshwater lake. For more than 100 years, they have been a curiosity to Owens Valley ranchers and to scientists alike.

Even with eyes open, Hull has difficulty imagining that these picture-covered rocks are an endangered species.

But they are. Increased seismic activity beneath Little Lake is causing the cliffs to crumble and the Native American rock art to disappear.

Hull is a retired aerospace computer programmer from Manhattan Beach. He is part of a team of volunteer archeologists from around Los Angeles that is hurrying to map and photograph thousands of petroglyphs so future generations of scientists can study them.

“We’re preserving California history in a very real sense,” says JoAnne Van Tilburg, a Malibu archeologist who heads UCLA’s Rock Art Archive and since 1993 has directed the volunteers’ work at Little Lake.

“The oldest of the sites here could definitely collapse in a good rumbler,” she says. “We have seen boulders topple and rock art disappear.”

The fragile nature of the rugged, rocky site is being duly noted by state officials. On May 17, Van Tilburg and her volunteers were named a winner of this year’s Governor’s Historic Preservation Award by the State Historical Resources Commission.

The place “is being destroyed” by earthquakes. “This project preserves the site through technology,” declared the commission citation.

“Requiring no public funds, it has performed a major public service. The Little Lake rock art complex offers incredibly valuable insight into California’s past and world heritage, and this project preserves it in an innovative, modern way.”

As officials in Sacramento were announcing the award, seismographs in Pasadena were registering a magnitude-3.0 temblor at 12:49 p.m. at Little Lake. A magnitude-3.6 quake followed an hour later, causing rocks from at least one bluff to tumble. Seismologists blamed a network of small faults that crisscross the Little Lake area, along with an active magma chamber beneath the region.

Researchers have concluded that the earliest Little Lake rock art was etched perhaps 14,000 years ago. There is evidence that the stone sketching continued through the mid-1800s as Native American groups passed through the Owens Valley.

Studies done in the early 1900s suggested that the lake drawings depicted hunting magic and the Indians’ continuing quest for food. Experts now believe that the artwork reflects hallucinogenic trances experienced by medicine men known as shamans.

The trances were induced by fasting, physical exertion or ingestion of native tobaccos. As the medicine men rhythmically hammered away on the rocky ledges that lace the 80-foot-high cliffs, their imaginations took flight.

It required days of pounding one stone against another to make hundreds of the tiny indentations on the cliff that created each drawing. The result was often a fanciful design resembling a barbell, a concentric circle or a net. Archeologists have labeled the latter “dream catchers,” although many other pictures are undecipherable.

The medicine men were both the religious and political leaders of the Indian bands. The shaman rock art sites were considered sacred places and were protected from generation to generation.

Space Age equipment is being used by volunteer archeologists cataloging Little Lake’s Stone Age culture.

“It’s a chance to not only help solve a puzzle but to get outside and stretch your legs,” says Tony Hull, a Long Beach astronomer whose tools include laser range-finders, global position satellites, digital cameras and computers.

Robert Pisapia, a former oil company executive from Thousand Oaks, says Little Lake’s art probably conveys a variety of messages.

“There’s no Rosetta stone to this. Some things we can’t decipher. Others we can,” he says. “Look at those three bighorn sheep. They were revered for their power. The Native Americans were trying to absorb it, to get power for the hunt.”

Chuck Vezzetti, an electrical engineer from West Los Angeles who has spent 35 weekends at Little Lake, says he has doubts that the group will ever discover the key to the petroglyphs. “But the data we’re collecting will help somebody else crack it someday,” he says.

Volunteer Gwen Harwood, a Woodland Hills homemaker, picked up a sharp-edged sliver of black obsidian and identified it as a remnant of tools that Native Americans made at Little Lake to trade for food and other necessities.

“They would use this to strip bark and hides. There’s no obsidian around here--this was carried in here in big blocks from China Lake, 15 miles away. It was traded all the way to the Channel Islands,” she says.

Noel Van Slyke, a retired naval analyst from Camarillo, says the 30 volunteers remain in awe of the rock art, even after years of spending weekends studying it.

“Take this bear paw. It could have been here when Columbus came across,” Van Slyke says, pointing to its outline in dark basalt rock. “We are standing where an ancient Native American stood. He was right here.”

John Bretney, a Yorba Linda aerospace engineer, says desert-dwelling Piute and Shoshone Indians returned repeatedly to Little Lake because of its water supply and its waterfowl: It is an annual stopping-off place for geese and ducks traveling the Pacific flyway.

“People have been here since people were on this continent. And they are still using this place today,” says volunteer Inge Nagel, a retired teacher from Lancaster. On the walls of one small cave she found petroglyphs. On its floor she found an empty beer can.

Little Lake is only lightly touched by civilization, however. The lake, its cliffs and its caves are part of a 1,400-acre ranch that has been owned since the early 1980s by 25 Los Angeles-area sportsmen. They use it several months a year for duck hunting.

The owners, who employ a ranch manager at the site, welcome archeologists.

One of the owners, retired financial services executive Jim Pearson of Marina del Rey, became so intrigued by Little Lake’s rock art that he enrolled at UC Santa Barbara and earned a PhD in archeology. His master’s thesis was on dating petroglyphs at Little Lake.

His interpretation of the numerous bighorn sheep depicted on the cliffs is that they relate to the continuing presence of water at Little Lake.

Pearson says seismic activity is taking its toll, however.

“It’s already happening. On the east side of the lake there’s a stress slope,” he says. “They had a quake there yesterday and stone tumbled down. That’s why the work UCLA is doing is so valuable.”

Archeologist David S. Whitley, whose recent book “The Art of the Shaman: Rock Art of California” outlines the role of early medicine men, says the current shaking has been going on about 15 years.

“The bottom line is it’s destroying these sites at Little Lake,” says Whitley, a former archeology professor who lives in Fillmore. He is glad that the site’s individual sketches--which he calls “motifs”--are being documented.

“In the mid-’70s I could tell you where motifs were in any boulder,” he says. “From visit to visit I can see changes in where these motifs are.”

UCLA’s Van Tilburg says about 5,000 of the lake’s drawings have been photographed, marked on special maps and entered into a computer database. That represents about 60% of the petroglyphs. She estimates that it will take an additional two years to finish the job.

Van Tilburg recruited her volunteers from UCLA Extension courses she teaches. She has delayed completion of a continuing Easter Island archeological study she is heading so she can continue work at Little Lake.

Each weekend her volunteers contribute the equivalent of $45,000 worth of archeological service, Van Tilburg says.

At night they put away their digital cameras and laptop computers, share a potluck dinner and retire to individual tents and campers at the very place that Native Americans once lived in primitive shelters made of brush and where mysterious medicine men toiled over their stoned imaginary.

Van Tilburg curls up in a roomy BMW sport-utility vehicle. As stillness descends upon the Owens Valley, the loss of Little Lake’s prehistoric record is something she refuses to imagine.