Today is the Winter Solstice, and the fifteenth (!) anniversary of this blog, so I thought I would take a break from my ongoing series on epidemics and depopulation to talk about an interesting rock art site I visited...
Today is the Winter Solstice, and the fifteenth (!) anniversary of this blog, so I thought I would take a break from my ongoing series on epidemics and depopulation to talk about an interesting rock art site I visited recently and its archaeoastronomical potential.
The La Cieneguilla site is relatively obscure and I’ve been able to find very little about it in published sources. It is a few miles southwest of Santa Fe and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which has a very basic webpage about it but doesn’t otherwise provide much information. I’ve been curious about it for many years, and this fall I finally got the opportunity to visit it. I had quite a hard time finding the actual petroglyphs there; it’s a semi-developed site but the wayfinding is limited and confusing. Part of the purpose of this post is to clarify how to get to the actual petroglyphs, which is not obvious (or at least wasn’t to me) from the entrance to the site.
Starting from the parking lot, there is a trail that leads to a sign giving some basic information, then there is a trail leading to the petroglyphs themselves. Actually there are trails going in two directions; take the one going left from the sign. It continues along a fence for a ways, then turns right at the foot of the escarpment and sort of fades away. The petroglyphs are on a series of boulders at the top of the escarpment, and there isn’t really a single well-defined trail to get to them. You have to kind of feel your way around the boulders, which cover the entire escarpment. It’s much easier if you already know where the petroglyphs are, which I did not when I first visited. As I was leaving I met some people coming up and pointed out the petroglyphs from the bottom of the escarpment to help them get there easier than I had.
The escarpment and boulder field extend for many miles in both directions, but the petroglyphs are heavily concentrated in a small area. Escarpments with boulder fields like this are common locations for petroglyphs in this region (Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque contains several), but this concentration in one small area is unusual. More on that later.
The petroglyphs themselves generally seem to be classified as part of the Rio Grande Style, which is a late prehistoric style common in the upper Rio Grande Valley and includes the Albuquerque petroglyphs. It is generally dated to the Pueblo IV or Rio Grande Classic period. There are indeed many stylistic similarities at La Cieneguilla to the other Rio Grande Style sites, but there are also some interesting differences that suggest to me that it may be somewhat older. Most noticeably, there are few of the “face” or “mask” images that are so common in the Rio Grande Style, and may derive from the Jornada Style found earlier to the south. Similarly, there is little use of the shape of the rock surface to create “3-D” type images, often associated with the masks at other Jornada and Rio Grande Style sites. Instead there are many spirals, birds, and stylized human figures, including flute-players, motifs commonly found at earlier sites to the north and west, including Chaco Canyon.
So, back to the clustering. Unlike the sites at Petroglyph National Monument, where petroglyphs cover wide swathes of the boulder fields, the La Cieneguilla petroglyphs are concentrated in just a very small area at the top of the escarpment. The rocks themselves don’t seem to have any particular distinction relative to the rest of the boulder field, so something else must have driven this concentration. The escarpment generally faces east, the direction of sunrise, so an astronomical alignment of some kind occurred to me as I was looking at them. I stood in front of one of the most elaborate panels and turned around to look at the horizon.
The horizon was broken, another common feature of astronomical observation sites. There is a distant range of hills or low mountains that occupies the center of one’s field of vision along the horizon from this exact spot. This would be an excellent place to observe a sunrise on an important occasion, I thought. But when? I took out my phone and opened the compass app, and pointed it at the edge of the mountain range to see if the azimuth corresponded to any important date in the solar year.
The result: DUE EAST. That seems significant! It suggests an equinox alignment, which is less common in Puebloan archaeoastronomy than solstice alignments but still a known pattern. I checked a few other azimuths from other elaborate panels but didn’t find anything particularly noteworthy. More diligent analysis may turn up other alignments, but even if this was purely an observing station for the equinox sunrise that would explain the clustering of the petroglyphs in this small area.
Bringing this all together, some thoughts: The combination of stylistic traits that seem relatively early with a possible astronomical alignment is intriguing with regard to regional connections. Astronomical alignments are strongly associated with Chaco, so this could be evidence that the residents of the La Cieneguilla area were part of an interaction sphere including groups to the north and west quite early on, during the Developmental Period that was contemporary with Chaco and Pueblo II to the west, or possibly the succeeding Coalition Period that is usually thought to correspond to the influx of population from the abandonment of the Mesa Verde region.
I’m not aware of documented astronomical alignments at other Rio Grande Style petroglyph sites, but that could be because no one has thought to look for them. A detailed study of other sites might turn up some surprises. But assuming for the moment that this is not a trait associated with the Classic Period and the Rio Grande Style, the La Cieneguilla evidence suggests that the influx of southern influence during (or just before?) the Classic Period may have mixed with an earlier tradition with ties to the west during the Developmental and Coalition Periods to produce what we now call the Rio Grande Style, in the course of which the astronomical association may have been lost or redirected to other contexts.
In any case, La Cieneguilla is an interesting site, well worth a visit. Happy Solstice!