Chumash Painted Cave and the Plank Canoe
Near Santa Barbara, California
High in the Santa Ynez Mountains, up a narrow winding road, a small sandstone cavern holds one of the finest collections of Chumash rock art in California. Known as the Painted Cave, or in the Chumash language as alaxuluxen, its walls are crowded with red ocher, black charcoal, and white images, geometric shapes, cross hatching, wheel like forms, and figures that may represent the sun, moon, and stars. Many of the paintings are several centuries old, but the Chumash almost certainly used the site for ceremonies long before that.
Some scholars believe the artists belonged to the antap, a select spiritual society, and that some images were painted to keep balance in the heavens. A metal gate now protects the fragile art from vandals. The Chumash were master mariners.
They built the tomol, a sleek plank canoe sewn and sealed with natural asphaltum, or tar, that seeps from the ground and washes up along this coast. Frameless, with no internal ribs, the tomol carried people and trade goods across open water to the Channel Islands and back, a technology passed down through generations. To the Chumash the canoe also carried something deeper.
Some elders said the painted images of tomols showed souls of the dead paddling to the afterworld.
