Rock Art near Willard, UT
I guess this is the appropriate forum for this. Does anyone have any info on the rock art talked about in this article? It originally appeard in the Salt Lake Tribune on Aug. 18, 2005. Entitled "Utah's Freemont Rock Art Fading". Thanks.
WILLARD, Utah (AP) - Devil Man is fading. Running Deer is almost gone. Some figures in Snake Cave are almost unrecognizable.
After 1,000 years concealed in caves that now overlook Willard Bay, these Fremont pictographs have suffered over the last 30 years.
So a group of amateur archaeologists, the Promontory-Tubaduka chapter of the Utah Statewide Archaeological Society, got together recently to photograph, draw, GPS, map and just look at the paintings in six caves - before they're even harder to see.
Some of the paintings - smeared red ochre pigment depicting bighorn sheep, deer and warriors - have been obscured by smoke from recent campfires. But most of the fading has been weather-related.
"The wet years we had back in the middle '80s just hammered these," said Mark Stuart, chapter president and trip leader.
Stuart first explored the area in the 1960s, finding ancient drawings in four caves along the shoreline of old Lake Bonneville. At the tail end of his last trip there, a few months ago, he discovered a fifth cave. And Boy Scouts along on that trip found another nearby, one that Stuart never saw.
"I've come up here for 40 years, and every time I come up, I see something new," Stuart said.
This time the something new was that sixth cave, home to painted bird tracks, humans, snakes and other animals - in all, about 15 figures etched in a cave accessible only by a short, moderately difficult scramble.
Stuart led the July 30 outing in an effort to record the sites, new and old, for inclusion in the Intermountain Antiquities Computer System, a database of more than 50,000 archaeological sites in the Intermountain West.
"What we're doing is called recon," Stuart said. "We're just trying to tie up some loose ends."
Nine chapter members - from Tremonton, Eden, Morgan, Ogden and Kaysville - showed up for the trip. Rob Hadley of Morgan left satisfied.
"Wow. You look at it from down here and there's nothing there," Hadley said at the trip's end. "But you get up in there and there's rock art all over."
But don't go there looking for the Top of Utah version of Newspaper Rock. Moab's most famous rock art site boasts hundreds of drawings created over more than 1,500 years. Willard's paintings are all from one era, the Fremonts, who inhabited the Top of Utah from roughly A.D. 1000 to 1300. Each site has no more than two dozen separate figures, half of which could be missed by an untrained eye.
"It's fabulous, just an amazing site," Stuart said as he sketched in a notepad his version of a depiction of a man next to several almost-invisible circles. He made the sketches because the paintings were too faded to show up on camera.
But this is his first record of a cave he walked past "probably 40 times" in about 40 years of visits. That's where the excitement comes from: finding another spot where local hunter-gatherer-farmers camped 1,000 years ago in their search for game.
There are some explicit symbols recorded in one cave. Stuart called them "sex objects." Jo Harline, of Ogden, opted for "fertility symbols," a sacred plea for healthy offspring.
But most of the paintings seem to be designed to help the hunter find game.
Archaeological studies have concluded that some Fremont Indians spent most of their lives as farmers; others were almost exclusively hunter-gatherers; and still others may have spent some time in each category.
Fremonts farmed much of the land around the Great Salt Lake, especially where streams entered. The population peaked in the 1100s, and farming ceased during a serious drought in the 1300s.
Archaeologists debate whether Shoshones and other American Indians descended from the Fremont or if the people moved or died at the end of the civilization. Shoshone tradition links them with the Fremont.
The early Mormons gravitated to the same fertile areas inhabited by the Fremont. The remains of Fremont villages lie under Ogden, Willard, Farmington and nearly every other early Mormon settlement.
A large Fremont village that survived the early settlement period was bulldozed during the creation of Willard Bay, and smaller sites were lost to Interstate 15, but the rugged hunting camps above have remained immune to development.
