Petroglyph: Twenty-Four Thousand Messages

About two hundred thousand years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions piled basalt lava across the West Mesa in a ridge seventeen miles long. The lava cooled into dark rock and sat under the New Mexico sun for millennia, its surface oxidizing into a chocolate-brown crust called desert varnish. Beginning roughly three thousand years ago, and accelerating between thirteen hundred and sixteen hundred of the Common Era, people began carving through the varnish to the lighter rock beneath. The contrast made the images permanent.

There are roughly twenty-four thousand petroglyphs on the West Mesa escarpment today. Most were made by ancestral Pueblo peoples. Several hundred were made by Tiwa people, some by Spanish colonists, a few by early Anglo settlers. The images include spirals, human figures, birds, deer, hand prints, masks, kachina figures, and forms whose meaning belongs to living Pueblo ceremonial tradition and has not been shared with outside researchers, nor should it be.

The National Monument protecting the escarpment was established in nineteen ninety. Before that, suburban development pressed against the basalt ridge from both sides, and segments of the rock face were damaged by vandalism. After designation, development pressure did not stop. In two thousand one, the city of Albuquerque succeeded in routing a four-lane road, Paseo del Norte, directly through the northern section of the monument, over the objections of the SAGE Council, a Native-founded citizens' group, the Sierra Club, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Nine petroglyphs were relocated. The road went through.

The monument receives roughly three hundred thousand visitors a year. The Pueblo peoples whose ancestors carved the images continue to regard the escarpment as a living cultural site, not a museum exhibit. The two framings coexist uneasily at the trailhead parking lots on the western edge of the city.