Fish Cave can be found on the shoreline of ancient lake Lahontan. It was named for the fish fossils found nearby during the the earliest archeological investigations.
Today little of interest remains in the cave itself, which was excavated and also later raided for guano. The cave is a dank and nasty spot now. Some of the artifacts recovered from the cave are very interesting, though. During the excavations some hunting sticks were found – curved sticks that would be thrown to bring down wild rabbits or other prey – but most importantly, a female burial was found towards the back of the cave. Some hair from this burial was later carbon dated to roughly 2,600 years before present. That gives us one estimate of this site’s age.
Another comes from the petroglyphs themselves. An extensive study of the region’s petroglyphs led a researcher to date human activity at Fish Cave to starting at around 8,500 years ago – a number that is collaborated by examining the hunting sticks found, which correspond to specimens that were dated to around 9,000 years ago.
Of course, none of these facts by themselves suggest that we’re looking at petroglyphs that are thousands of years old when we look at this site … but the style and amount of revarnishing of these petroglyphs do suggest substantial age for most of them. All the rocks are very darkly varnished, and the petroglyphs themselves show a lot of revarnishing too. I would think that we likely are talking about thousands of years when we estimate the age of these petroglyphs.
All the more reason to respect this site and to leave it just as you found it, should you visit. Spend some time in this forsaken place, wandering among the thousands of small boulders, and think back to the time when the dry lake bed was filled with water and these shores teemed with life.
Boulder after boulder, peeking out of the grass.
One of the nicest panels at the site. There is a concentric circle with a line running through it, an element not uncommon in this area, and some other designs. Over on the right side is a zoomorph.
When viewed from this angle, the concentric circle element almost seem to be pointing towards something.
The little zoomorph – a lizard forever crawling up the rock and never quite making it. It may have been at it for thousands of years.
A rake element. These can be entoptic imagery, brought on by ingesting a hallucinogenic substance.
This faint element is almost net-like, but there are a lot of misdirected pecks.
A cross with a trailing meander line.
Some elements are very faint, like this shield design with an inner grid.
Many of the boulders have rudimentary designs on them.
Here is a larger panel, dominated by a squiggle line.
There are so many boulders peeking out of the grass. So many boulders … that we had to look at … so many … so, so many … in the foreground is the boulder with the lizard and the target design on it.
Here’s a boulder with a design on the side, and what might be a mortar hole on the top.
A couple of tiny petroglyphs – small circles touching each other, with some lines extending from one of them.
There are several squiggle lines at this site. This one was easy to see. Trust me, it can be very hard to find anything at this site – the boulders are revarnished and glint brightly in the sunlight, making the petroglyphs hard to see and hard to photograph, too.
Some of these designs are not very exciting, like this oval with a center dot and a stem, but even a simple design like this took several hours to peck on the hard surface. Often a chisel, made from a harder stone, bone, or obsidian, was used, with a hammer stone for the strikes. This design does not have a lot of misdirected pecks – it was likely made with a chisel and hammer stone, as just described. Petroglyphs with misdirected pecks were often made by striking the surface directly with another stone – a less precise technique.
The other well-decorated boulder at the site. There’s a lot of meander lines here, and some shield designs.
The always common lines-and-circles design can be found here as well.
Look, there’s our boulder with the mortar on top in the background.
Fish Cave is a fairly modest site as petroglyphs go, but it has a lot of history behind it. It is worth a visit just to think about the people who came before.