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. 

Finished Travel Journal

Hi everyone  Happy Friday. 

Week 3 of online school has wrapped up. We have now gone to 4 day "teaching" weeks, where we can have kids turn in work on Wednesday but we can't have Wednesday classes. The point is to give us teachers a day to work, the kids a day to catch up, and everyone a day to de-stress a bit. I got to meet  online with the other 3 women who teach biology and we got to do some planning for next week, plus it gave me a day to finish up early afternoon and take a deep breath. That was one of the smartest decisions yet.

So yesterday after working I spent some time in my happy spot and finished my February New Mexico trip travel journal. Since we are all home let me take you on a bit of armchair travel.

(I'll let you know this is rather a long post.)

Here's 2 of my journal spread.
And notice the circles on the right hand page? I am going to link up to Valerie's geometric shape challenge at Art Journal Journey

 Today we will visit another National Park, this one is the historical park of Chaco Culture. It was pretty amazing. We visited here on the last day of trip, and afterwards we drove back to Albuquerque as we were flying home in the next morning.
And more squares for the challenge at Art Journal Journey.

Chaco Culture is in northwestern New Mexico, and is over an hour to the nearest town/city. To get there it you have to drive down a pretty sketchy road. It is 21 miles or almost 34 kilometers, so it takes quite a while to drive into the park because you can't go very fast..

Chaco Culture park is in Chaco Canyon.  Archeologists believe that was a place where some type of ceremonial events occured between the years 850-about 1300. They don't really know quite what, but this place has some huge stone buildings spread out over a really large area.  My photos don't show you how huge this place was, but they do give you a glimpse of the fantastic building techniques that were used.

We were there for the day and hardly scratched the surface as the cliche goes.

 From these ruins they can estimate that many of these buildings were 5 stories high.

The landscape was desert and western.

And I made a new friend there too.

 He seemed to know I was eating some peanuts and came over next to our car-at 2 different parking lots we were in.

 And of course after I gave him one he decided I needed to give him a few more. But I didn't mind sharing.

 He was obviously use to doing this. 

What a photo hog.

It was quite an amazing place,  and my imagination makes me wonder what it had been like back when it was an active place.  

I hope you enjoyed your visit to my blog today.

And happy start to your weekend.

Happy Weekend

Hi everyone.

I hope everyone is having a nice weekend at home. I think that is where most of us are spending our time now. My big event was taking an early morning trip to the grocery store. The hubby went with me but because he is immune suppressed he  just waited in the car. I'm hoping the wind won't feel so cold tomorrow so I can get out for a walk, which would have been nice today, but oh well.  And Monday evening the prediction is for a pretty good dumping of snow. OH NO! Let's hope that changes.

But the real excitement of the day was spending most of my afternoon in my happy space with some extended art time. I got caught up on some challenge pieces, and then worked on my New Mexico travel journal. I thought I would share a few pages from that travel journal with you today.

I went back to a mini ring binder for this project. And mostly I been doing some collage style pages. But not  all. I found this travel magazine while in New Mexico, and it was even a freebie. I've been using lots of images from it, as well as some of the little write ups. 

I also added some stickers and business cards I picked up as well as some ephemera I had in my stash.

I used a bit of a map to outline our travels, as well as making a tag that explained those travels.

The right side of this last spread used an image out of the magazine, mainly because it reminded me so much of the view from our friends home in Taos. And on the left I made a page about our trip into Taos, off the beaten path., through the National Monument. 

This National Monument is one that celebrates the Rio Grande River gorge.  Here are photos of the upper part of the gorge and the very high bridge that goes over it.

But  my husband and I took the back way into town, as the main road into Taos would totally bypass the bridge. 

We started on the bottom of the gorge, next to the river. This is the same river you are looking down upon in the upper photos.

 And then we crossed the river over the bridge and started up a steep gravel road that wound back and forth around the sides of the gorge.

 And before we knew it we made it to the top of the gorge.

 Can you make out the river?

It was quite an exciting ride. And I think it was a highlight for my husband.

 And at the top of the gorge you come onto the large flat top of the mesa.

That dark line you can make out on the right of the photo is the edge of the gorge.

That's all for me today.

Thanks for visiting. And stay smart and healthy.

Petroglyphs

Hi everyone. Now that we have all become more or less homebodies and changed some of our habits, it is hard to believe that it was just three weeks ago my husband and I traveled to New Mexico. Boy things have changed so quickly. Now I wouldn't want to go anywhere, but 4 weeks ago when we left it was a different world.  I suppose at some point in the future we'll be back to normal again. Or maybe it will be a new normal.

Anyhow, back on our trip we did several National Monuments and Parks. Last week I took you to Bandelier, and today I will take you to Petroglyph National Monument, which is right in Albuquerque, the state's biggest city.

This park was formed because as the city was growing so quickly in the past in 30 years, miles of rocks covered with petroglyphs were found. Luckily  smart people got involved and had this place turned into a national monument before all the petroglyphs were lost.
This park is unusual as there are 3 different places were you can see these ancient rock drawings. All are hikes/walks of various lengths. As the day promised some rain, we chose the shortest trail, which should have been about a 2 mile round trip. Of course we did have some rain, and in order not to get all wet and having to sit in those wet clothes, we ended up not completing the entire trail. But we did probably make about a mile and half.
The petroglyphs were great though.

These are just a few. No one knows exactly what these mean. Perhaps directions along a trail, perhaps a story. They do think they belonged to the ancient Pueblo people, perhaps the same people who lived at Bandelier that I showed you last week.
I also saw a couple of cool birds while we walked.

 How about this roadrunner? He stood there and did several poses for me.

 And we saw this hawk.

You can see the rain off on the other side of the city and in the mountains.

I made a spread in my travel journal to remember this.

That's all for me today.
Be smart and safe and stay healthy!
Thanks for visiting.