Often a site consists of a handful of pictographs, or a few petroglyphs, or perhaps a granite slab hosting bedrock mortars. Sometimes, the mortars and the pictographs go together. Other times, there might be grinding slicks close to petroglyphs.

This is the first time I’ve found all three in one location!

This site is in Joshua Tree National Park. If JTNP is known for one thing – besides Joshua trees – it is known for clusters of granite boulders … and it is in one of these clusters that this site is located. This site was for many years an excellent habitation site, and today we can still see the remnants of this activity.

The site is close to a dry wash and not too far from a ( now dry ) spring, so it certainly was an inviting spot at one time.

My first inkling that this pile of boulders would be different was a single bedrock mortar, hosted on the outskirts of the site.

I dutifully recorded it but at that time my attention was on something else nearby, a scattering of historic debris – one of the many can dumps that 18th and early 19th century pioneers left in their wake.

Often, these historic settlements took the place of older Native American settlements. Human life depends on the same necessities of life after all, and water is the greatest of these.

I poked through the can dump with my hiking pole, looking for something more interesting than a mere rusted can. I could tell that a lot of these were fairly old, being side-soldered, but they were nothing remarkable by themselves: these dumps can be found all over the place in the area. Sometimes there is a little gem in them, though: something well-preserved or curious.

Not this time. Finding nothing remarkable in the can dump, I wandered among the rocks. It was late afternoon, early evening almost. A very pleasant time to be out in the desert. The day’s heat has broken, the still air is coming alive with an evening breeze and a soft evening light is settling in. I felt lucky to be enjoying such a pleasant time of day out in the clean, sharp desert.

Presently, my companion’s call rousted me from my reverie. He had found something! I snapped back to the present and scurried through the rocks to go look.

Ah! What a nice find! Trumping my single bedrock mortar, he had found a small outcropping with two mortars. And more than that – this outcropping housed cupules as well!

Well now. This was interesting. I squatted down next to the bedrock. This pattern, a bedrock mortar with cupules, is just like the one found at the Lone Woman site, some miles away. In this case the stone holds two mortars, not one, but still! It seemed like too much of a coincidence.

I looked around. The surrounding boulders weren’t remarkable at all. It was unlikely that this site had an interplay of light like the one at the Lone Woman site, but it might be worth checking out sometime.

I straightened up, resisting the urge to brush the dirt from the cupules for a better picture. I try to step very lightly in these places.

This was already an interesting site! Not that I was about to stop looking – past experience taught me that where there’s one thing there’s often more so we fanned out, scanning the adjacent rocks.

It didn’t take long to find more bedrock mortars in one direction, and a small overhang with pictographs in the other!

The pictographs were not particularly exciting, just small, abstract shapes nestled to the rear of a tiny rock shelter.

And when I say tiny, I mean tiny! The rock shelter was too small to sit up in. This is somewhat unusual: pictographs are usually found in larger shelters than this.

However, I have found some in a tiny shelter before so I was tuned in to the possibility this time, else I may have missed these entirely.

Of course, now that I’d spotted them, I had to photograph them! I crawled into the shelter, digging my bare elbows into the coarse sand, and squirmed around, trying to point the camera at the pictographs while avoiding a brain-rattling encounter with the low rock above.

Photos taken, I rested on my elbow for a moment, examining the rest of the shelter.

After my eyes got used to the dim light in the rock shelter, I noticed more faint pigment over on the lip of the shelter. Could that be man-made too, or is it just natural?

It was way too faded to tell. Well, nothing else for it … I pressed my cheek into the desert sand, awkwardly squinting through the viewfinder and trying to get the whole rock face in the picture and in focus. At least this shelter was mercifully void of cactus spikes! I’ve had that experience before, too – throwing myself to the ground to get a good shot and landing on a “mattress” of cactus spikes.

After I felt I had taken enough photos blindly so I’d have at least something good to work on with DStretch later, I was done with the shelter.

I awkwardly backed out of it, scooting backwards on my knees and elbows with my butt wiggling in the air.

After extracting myself I hopped over some boulders to rejoin my companion over by the additional bedrock mortars.

Not too far from the bedrock with the two mortars in it was another single mortar on a shallow rock shelf, and two more set under a small overhang. All were at comfortable working height and the rock under the overhang seemed to have another shallow mortar started on it.

Now, when finding bedrock mortars it is not that uncommon to discover dung deposited in them.

Often it appears to be carnivore poop. I like to think that many a bobcat had found these mortars a convenient shortcut to a cat hole!

In this case though, the dung in one of the mortars was altogether more … omnivorous.

We poked it and its accompanying paper out of the mortar hole before taking pictures.

Normally I’d pack out refuse, but this was a little too icky and I had nothing to wrap it in.

Some people ( and their dung ) are why we can’t have nice things, I guess!

After the excitement of the pictographs and bedrock mortars – tempered a little by the nasty find in the mortar – we continued exploring the rocky outcropping.

The next thing we found was almost overlooked.

While there are many rock shelters and overhangs in these outcroppings, they often go unused because they are filled with loose rock or on a slope.

We had found such an overhang and it didn’t look at all promising because of all the loose rock and boulders under it.

However, there was a shallow mortar / large cupule on one of the rocks close by the entrance.

This was a curious placement, so we peered in further. Access was very cramped so I worked on getting past the cupule rock while my companion walked round and tried the shelter’s upper entrance.

Surprise!

On the floor of the shelter was a smallish rock with a bedrock mortar in the center, surrounded by a deliberate pattern of cupules.

This is a really interesting discovery – this is now the third such pattern of mortars with cupules I found in the area. It occurs too frequently to be coincidence, and this particular specimen was in a very awkward spot.

While the other two may have been for food preparation ( though the one at the Lone Woman was deliberately placed to interact with the sunlight ) this one seems like it must have been for ritual purposes.

The rock shelter shows no sign of habitation – the jumbled rocks are awkward to climb over and hides the mortar rock pretty well.

The mortar itself is fairly deep and would have taken some effort to create.

The cupules are a little less well-formed but deliberately arranged. Very interesting.

After examining the rock I exited the shelter and resumed my exploration.

It didn’t take long to discover some petroglyphs! Wow!

By this point, the hunt was a lot of fun.

For every experience like this where it seems like every rock and shelter holds a treasure, many hours are spent tromping through the desert and looking at every rock and under every overhang without finding a single thing.

The petroglyphs, much like the pictographs, are not particularly elaborate.

The rock in this area is all granite, so petroglyphs tend to be very shallowly pecked or scratched.

When I first started exploring JTNP I thought petroglyphs were very rare in the area. The better known sites all sported pictographs, after all – and the granite boulders are much better suited to pictographs than petroglyphs.

Looks can be deceiving and assumptions can be inaccurate. Now that I have poked around a little more I’ve come to realize that petroglyphs are almost as common as pictographs in JTNP. They just tend to be a little further off the beaten track.

I wonder whether these petroglyphs predate the pictographs – or, I should rather say that I wonder by how much the petroglyphs predate the pictographs. The designs belong to the Great Basin Abstract classification of rock art: Rectilinear and basic Representational ( the atlatl-like designs in particular ) figures. Petroglyphs can date back to thousands of years ago and are a much more durable form of rock art than pictographs are.

Our day wasn’t done after finding these two petroglyphs! There was another enormous rock shelter nearby that I thought for sure would have more pictographs or petroglyphs in it.

However, it was completely barren, except for a single cupule ground into the sloped floor. A small distance outside the shelter sat another small mortar on a larger boulder.

Once we found these two mortars our search petered out. The sun had sunk low in the sky and the rock pile was at an end, having seemingly shown us all it had to offer.

We still had a mile or so to walk to get back to our truck so we started to hoof it back.

On the way I detoured to take a quick look at another, smaller rock pile. This pile had a single large mortar on a flat boulder but nothing else. There was some pinion pines growing among the boulders, so it would have made a good station for grinding the nuts.

Our exploration at an end, we walked back through the desert, cameras laden with pictures. It was a good day!

Now, if you happen to come upon this site, please respect it. There is a lot of history here and plenty of interesting things to find. Walk around and think about the people who were here before you, look around and find the signs of their presence. Do not touch the petroglyphs or pictographs, because your touch will wear them down.

And do not use the mortars to dispose of your waste – you are not an animal.