Frying Pan Petroglyphs

As I was doing some research for this blog I discovered the name of the first petro. site is known as Frying Pan. UNM students have researched the site. Here's some interesting info. This guy, on this rock is famous!


Rain god or Tlaloc petroglyph near Cook's peak, New Mexico. The goggled-eyed figure, so prevalent in the rock art of the Jornada region, is depicted in abbreviated form at the Mimbres sites. His presence is signified by the eyes along or eyes attached to striking blanket motifs. This figure is believed to be a northern version of the Meso-american rain god, Tlaloc.

Symbols on Stone

The Desert Archaic Indians left both representational and abstract figures on stone – the oldest known rock art in western North American – including many which pointed to a now enigmatic spiritual quest. They painted some of the images onto stone, rendering them with colored minerals and liquid binding agents applied, for example, with yucca-leaf brushes or their fingertips and hands. Painted images are often called "pictographs" or simply "rock paintings." The Indians pecked, chiseled or incised other images into stone, producing them with blunt and with flaked stone tools. These are called "petroglyphs," and they are far more common than pictographs.

Typically, the Desert Archaic artists produced rock art near encampments, springs, streams, playas, trade routes, game feeding ranges and watering sites, and isolated, presumably sacred, sites. They seem to have preferred light-colored surfaces in secreted caves, alcoves, protected overhangs and rock shelters for pictographs, typically painted with red, yellow, black or white pigments. They favored darkly patinated basalt or sandstone rock outcrops or boulders for petroglyphs, often fully exposed, occasionally sequestered.

They produced representational images of such subjects as hunting scenes, hunters, game, weapons, shamans (presumably), horned masks, mythological figures, hand prints, foot prints, and reptiles and insects. "Obviously," says Kay Sutherland, a knowledgeable researcher in the rock art of the deserts of the Southwest and northern Mexico, "we have no direct oral or written records of the desert hunter/gather’s [sic] world view, but we can see shadowy vestiges of their beliefs?

"…we see hunting scenes of men wearing horned headdresses and carrying spears, mountain sheep and deer wounded by spears… We see, at Alamo Canyon in western Texas and Frying Pan Canyon in southwestern New Mexico, for instance, an anthropomorphization of spear, or dart, points, suggesting a spiritual relationship between the hunter and his weapon. We see associations between the death of an animal and the life of the hunter; the spear as a weapon and abundance for the hunters; the horns of big game animals and abundance for the hunters."