The West's oldest surviving literature is being destroyed
On petroglyphs, language and the inexpressible
It’s easy to miss the turn for the Newspaper Rock State Historical Monument, tucked into a shady gulch along Utah State Route 211, a road most frequently traveled by rock climbers and visitors to Canyonlands National Park. The parking lot is several times larger than the monument itself, which consists of a short path to a cliff wall full of petroglyphs carved over the centuries by the region’s Indigenous peoples. More than 600 individual glyphs have been chipped into the desert varnish, depicting everything from bear prints and horned humanoid figures to the arrival of horses in the 16th century and a wide range of inscrutable squiggles and symbols. The rock’s oldest glyphs are believed to be roughly 2,000 years old, and only a short railing and a few feet of space separate visitors from two millennia of recorded Native American history.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the site has been repeatedly vandalized over the years…