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Updated: July 2, 2025
While several pictographs of snakes are found on Sikyatki pottery, there is not a single instance in which these modern markings appear; consequently there is considerable doubt in regard to the identification of many of the Sikyatki serpents with modern mythologic representatives.
The Indian had his pictographs on the rocks for art, and his pottery and weaving to express his craftsmanship; but the rest of his artistic nature was expressed chiefly by religious ceremonial or theatrical dance, similar to the old miracle plays of the Middle Ages.
Several of the larger boulders were covered with pictographs. They represented a serpent and a sun, besides men and animals. Shortly afterwards we descended to the Rio Grande Valley at Callanga, where we pitched our camps among the most extensive ruins that I have seen in the coastal desert. They covered an area of one hundred acres, the houses being crowded closely together.
Marks on the cliff show that some of the houses had been three stories high. Some places on the cliff, which were apparently back-walls of rooms, were plastered and coated with white, and there are many pictographs on the rock. The masonry is of fair quality, but the stones were laid with more mortar than usual.
The overhanging rock makes a rude cave or grotto, and it has been named Mallery Grotto, after Garrick Mallery, the great authority on the pictographs of the North American Indians. His latest monograph takes up the whole of one of the large volumes of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, and in its nearly eight hundred pages there are one thousand two hundred and ninety illustrations.
The pictographs are mainly in a rich brownish-red, and are of deer, mountain-sheep, men and women, serpentine lines suggesting the course of rivers, rain-clouds, lightning, and many-legged reptiles, or what seem to represent these things.
These pictographs occur on a black, superficial layer of lava rock, or upon lighter stone with a malpais layer, which had been pecked through, showing a lighter color beneath. There is little doubt that many examples of aboriginal pictography exist in this neighborhood, which would reward exploration with interesting data.
Few pictographs were found in the immediate neighborhood of the cavate dwellings; indeed the rock in their vicinity is too soft to preserve for any considerable time any great number of these rock etchings. Examples of ancient paleography were, however, discovered a short distance higher up the river on malpais rock, which is harder and less rapidly eroded.
The tropes and figures of rhetoric by which the conceptions of the supernatural were first expressed, give the clue to primitive symbolism. A very few examples will be sufficient. The Pueblo Indians represent lightning in their pictographs by a zigzag line. A zigzag fence is called in the Middle States a worm or “snake” fence.
The pictographs of the latter are generally pecked into the rock with a sharpened implement, probably of stone, while those of the former are usually scratched or painted on the surface of the rocks. Their main differences, however, are found in the character of the designs and the objects represented.
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