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Area Description: All of these petroglyphs are located in an area know as the Gold Butte Region. One of the most popular areas is called the Falling Man Site. This is area is that is full of what just seem like large piles of red and white sandstone outcrops. However, the desert varnish on many of these rocks have made for a fascinating rock art gallery that is filled with dozens of ancient petroglyphs.. Unfortunately, I somehow missed two of the more famous panels, the “Falling Man'” panel or another large panel called “Newspaper Rock” that my friend Kathy Pool found (Fig. 02). The good news is that I did locate several other nice petroglyph panels. The further you hike into this area and the more you look, the more rock art you can find. No matter where we hiked here, there were beautiful views in almost every direction. Hopefully, a future visit will yield some better photos and even more petroglyphs. For more detail about the area, refer to my page… Falling Man Hike.
Due to a variety of petroglyph styles, pottery and other artifacts, it appears that Native Americans have made use of this area for thousands of years, making it difficult at best to determine who made what rock art. Some of the panels include superimposition of petroglyphs pecked over older images, meaning that later cultures may have visited the area and left their mark. It is thought that these petroglyphs were made by the Anasazi as early as 2000 years ago but nobody really knows for sure. Whatever the time frame, bands of Archaic hunter-gatherers lived here, followed by the Virgin Branch of the Keyenta Anasazi. When the Anasazi left sometime around 1000AD the Patayan and southern Paiute made Gold Butte their home.
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| (Fig. 02) |
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Here is a panel (Fig. 03 below) that was just full of anthropomorph and zoomorph symbols. As is typical, many of the panels (Figs. 04 & 05) contained what seemed like a variety of abstract symbols. The black and white picture (Fig. 07), a close-up of the panel in the rock face on the top right of (Fig. 06), has several interesting symbols. One looks like a turtle, a few others look like birds.As this was pretty high up on the rock face, I had to use my zoom lens and the picture quality isn't as good as it should be.
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| (Fig. 03) |
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| (Fig. 04) |
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| (Fig. 05) |
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| (Fig. 06) |
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| (Fig. 07) |
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One of the most detailed and complicated panels (Fig. 01) I located was off of North Mud Wash Road. It is located in the dark patina area of rock, just right of center in (Fig. 08). The glyphs in (Figs. 09 & 10) were located to the left of the main panel in (Fig. 01)
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| (Fig. 08) |
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| (Fig. 09) |
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| (Fig. 10) |
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