It all started, as many interesting discoveries do, with us scrambling around in a big boulder pile. While dodging pointy vegetation and finding footholds on sandy slopes or dodgy boulders I spot this little cave. Peering in, I see something unusual – an arrow chipped into the rock! Well, now. Usually, arrow motifs are historic in nature. They don’t really occur in any authentic rock art. Still, this is interesting … where does this arrow want me to go? I decided to find out.

After clambering up the first rock with an arrow, I find another. Hmmm … are you sure about this, arrow? Looks kind of dark and narrow in there! Still, arrows some random stranger carved into rocks who knows how many years ago wouldn’t lie to me or lead me astray, would they? I set aside my sunhat and sunglasses, sling my camera across my body, and squeeze into the gap.

After a short passage and an uncomfortable wriggle unto a rocky ledge, I emerge in sunlight again, now in the middle of a pile of boulders. So … that’s where I need to go next, I guess?

This gap leads me to a drop down a steeply slanted granite slab. There’s daylight ahead of me, which is good. Even better is the pictograph I spot on the overhang. All right! With the next photo we’ll have a closer look, it is hard to see at first. But if you want to look for it in this picture, look just to the left of center, on the rock face above the sunlit opening.

There it is! It blends in quite well with the rock face, but when you get close you can tell that there is definitely pigment there.

With some DStretch, you can tell that this is actually a pretty cool pictograph! There’s a spoked motif going on here, and two concentric circles. This is a neat pictograph – this motif seems to crop up a lot in this area.

There’s some blackening going on in the shelter just past this pictograph. Fires were probably built under this overhang at some point.

Opposite the shelter there is an even larger shelter, and there are a lot of pictographs in this shelter, but the first thing you see is this pictograph on the opposite wall.

A little bit of the rock face exfoliated, but the pictograph is still easily visible with DStretch. It is detailed, with a small circle at the bottom and three parallel bars running upwards.

Here is the rear wall of the larger shelter, showing the main pictograph panel. This is a polychrome panel with both black and red elements.

I will look at this panel in detail in another post, to make sure this post doesn’t get too long. But let’s take a quick look! Here is the same panel targeted with a DStretch algorithm that favors red pigment. Two clusters of red elements are visible today, though you can tell that some of the panel was obscured by smoke damage in the center so this was likely one continuous panel originally.

We’re about done with looking at this panel in this post. I’m just going to show a close-up of the central part of it, including the eponymous element which you can see in the lower center here, and then target it with DStretch algorithms designed for red pigment and black pigment respectively, so you can get an idea of what we’ll be looking at more next.

Here is that same picture with the red pigment targeted. Some really nice elements there!

Finally, we’ll highlight the black elements as well.