Sand Island: A Rock Wall Written Over Two Thousand Years

Just southwest of Bluff, on the banks of the San Juan River at a campground called Sand Island, a long wall of sandstone carries one of the most concentrated collections of ancient rock art in the American Southwest. The panel stretches more than a hundred yards across the cliff face and contains thousands of images carved and painted over a span that archaeologists estimate at between eight hundred and two thousand five hundred years. Looking at it is like reading a history written across the entire face of a cliff.

The earliest images are the work of people from the Basketmaker period, predecessors of the Ancestral Puebloans who would later build the great cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Their images include human figures, geometric designs, and animals. Later marks from the Pueblo I, Pueblo II, and Pueblo III periods record the changing artistic traditions of people who lived in this valley across generations, farming the river bottomland and hunting the mesa country above.

Ute and Navajo artists added their own marks in more recent centuries. The panel is a layered document, written by every people who knew this stretch of the San Juan River, one group's marks overlapping or extending another's across the full span of human habitation here. The largest figure on the panel is Kokopelli, the flute-playing form that appears throughout the rock art of the Southwest.

Here the image is painted large enough to see from across the river. Standing before the wall is a strange and quieting experience: unbroken human attention to this place, spanning more generations than most civilizations have lasted.