Pictographs and Petroglyphs

Hi there. I hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend.

 Today I am sharing another page for Elle's language challenge at Art Journal Journey.  My topic today is pictographs and petroglyphs. 

Here's definitions of each that I found on the internet.

A pictograph is a  pictorial symbol for a word or phrase. Pictographs were used as the earliest known form of writing, examples having been discovered in Egypt and Mesopotamia from before 3000 BC.

Cave paintings would be an example of a Pictograph. 

And a petroglyph would be

a rock carving, especially a prehistoric one.

These petroglyphs were on a rock in Albuquerque, New Mexico at Petroglyph National Monument, where there are hundreds of these.

No one knows exactly what these symbols in my photo mean, but perhaps they were directions or information for ancient people traveling on well used trails. 

Here's my journal page with lots of pictographs in the background.  Some of them were stamps designed from petroglyphs.

I painted the background with 3 tones of yellow and brown. I was trying to create a southwestern (US) rock looking surface. Then I stamped some images with red, brown and black ink. I tried to stamp a horse on acetate and add it for some texture, but it seems all you can see in the photo is the glare off the acetate.

The southwestern pot is another ancient stamp from my collection that I stamped in white on black paper before fussy cutting it. That is also true for the southwestern woven blanket image, but this time I stamped black on white. And finally I added the bear die cut, and I stamped the "handwritten by spider"  quote a few times on the page.  I was thinking that worked because some southwestern US Native American tribes have a story about the spider woman.

For the  Navajo people, Spider Women is a protector and helper to humans. In the Hopi culture, she can take on many shapes. When she is in her spider shape she lives in a hole in the ground. The Hopi and other ancient Pueblo people  had religious "holes" in the ground called kivas to mimic where Spider Woman lived in her spider shape.

This photo and the next photo were taken at Bandelier National Monument outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico. This park preserves an ancient Pueblo people settlement that is believed to have been inhabited between 1150-1699 AD. This large round area in the above photo might have been a kiva, but in the photo below, the small round structure sticking up is the top of a kiva. I've visited here twice. The first time I was able to crawl down a ladder into the kiva, which is always below ground, but this second time in early 2020 I could not.

This is a very large sacred kiva in the next photo is at Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northwestern New Mexico.  The amazing thing is that at Chaco Culture these beautiful stone buildings were created  between mid 800-mid 1200 AD, although much about these buildings are still a mystery.

That's all for me today. It's been a busy weekend with yard work and other things.  We needed to get an electric fence up around the bees as they'll be here in a matter of days.  The nice weather has made everything green up, and also has also reminded me I need to get plants into the ground. I feel like I am a little too much in homesteader mode right now, but hopefully, after today I should be caught up  with the preparing the gardens and beehive mode and just into the normal maintenance mode.

Hope you're also having a nice weekend and some beautiful weather also.

Thanks for visiting.