Rock Art Speculation: Kumeyaay Rock Art, Southern California Rock Art, San Diego Rock Art

Several years ago, this was the first pictograph panel I found in a survey area that must have been seasonal home to several hundred or more Kumeyaay Native Americans that have occupied most of land now known as San Diego and Imperial Counties and Northern Baja California.  While most of the existing pictograph panels are thought to have been painted within the last 500 years, few, if any of the desert panels have been dated by new, more reliable dating methods.  I always wonder if the Kumeyaay artist/shaman who renders an individual panel is still living in "pre-contact" days - before the Spanish and before the other Europeans essentially committed genocide on these people.  Then they weren't Native Americans, they were just the Kumeyaay.  In a land where few modern men could survive, they had achieved a great knowledge or respect of nature that allowed them to meet their physical and economic needs.  At the same time, the Shaman, whose work survives on this granite wall paints what might be a story of physical to spiritual transformation.  The anthropomorph on the left is just a simple painting of a man, while the being on the right may be a scintillating spiritual form.  This being may be what the Shaman must become, to lead his people by contact with the spiritual world.  Unfortunately, as what usually happens in our world, then, as now, spirituality is crushed by men who are too scared or greedy to live that way and condemn any who are, to be locked up in prisons or reservations, or to a physical death.

Close up of panel using D-Stretch.  Click on to enlarge.  Copyright 2014 by Don Liponi.
Interpretation of writing [if any] is on my list of things to do.  Any Kumeyaay feel free to contact me through SDRAA if you know what the writing means.  Thank you.



 

 

See you on the trail.