Coso Rock Art District is a rock art site containing over 100,000 Petroglyphs by Paleo-Indians and/or Native Americans.[1] The district is located near the towns of China Lake and Ridgecrest, California. Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons were declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964. In 2001, they were incorporated into this larger National Historic Landmark District.[2] There are several other distinct canyons in the Coso Rock Art District besides the Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons. Also known as Little Petroglyph Canyon and Sand Tanks, Renegade Canyon is but one of several major canyons in the Coso Range, each hosting thousands of petroglyphs (other locations include Haiwee Springs, Dead End Canyon, and Sheep Canyon). The majority of the Coso Range images fall into one of six categories: bighorn sheep, entopic images, anthropomorphic or human-like figures (including animal-human figures known as pattern-bodied anthropomorphs), other animals, weapons & tools, and "medicine bag" images. Scholars have proposed a few potential interpretations of this rock art. The most prevalent of these interpretations is that they could have been used for rituals associated with hunting.[3]
A November 2007 Los Angeles Times' Travel feature article includes it within a top 15 list of California places to visit.[4] The area was also mentioned in Groupon's "10 Most Unique Autumn Festivals in the Country"[5] as a part of the Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival.
Prehistory detail
According to that article: "No one knows for sure who decorated Little Petroglyph Canyon with images out of a dreamscape, some thought to be more than 10,000 years old. Or why the basalt walls of a narrow wash in the bone-dry Coso Mountains at the northern edge of the Mojave Desert became a magic canvas for flocks of bighorn sheep, hunters with bows and arrows poised and more. But the area is probably the richest AmerindianPetroglyph / rock-art site in the Western hemisphere. To see the canyon, one must contact either the Navy Base, or join a scheduled tour offered by Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, California or attend a Rock Art 101 program. A 40-mile drive on paved road except for the last 6 miles to access the trailhead, followed by a hike and a scramble along the canyon. Visits are scheduled only in the spring and fall."[4]
^ ab"Coso Rock Art District". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. Archived from the original on October 8, 2012. Retrieved November 17, 2007.
Garfinkel, Alan P. 1978 "Coso" Style Pictographs of the Southern Sierra Nevada. Journal of California Anthropology 5(1):94-101. [Reports on two sites in Indian Wells Canyon with painted images similar to the Coso Representational bighorn images. Concludes that these are the product of historic activities of the Kawaiisu and/or Panamint Shoshone and likely do not show cultural continuity but are probably evidence of the historic copying of more ancient imagery.]
2003 Dating "Classic" Coso Style Sheep Petroglyphs in the Coso Range and El Paso Mountains: Implications for Regional Prehistory. Society for California Archaeology Newsletter 37(4):34-37.
2005 Comment on Clarus Backes' "More Than Meets the Eye: Fluorescence Photography for Enhanced Analysis of Pictographs." Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 26(2):95-99. R
2006 Paradigm Shifts, Rock Art Theory, and the Coso Sheep Cult of Eastern California. North American Archaeologist 27(3):203-244. [Evaluation of hunting magic model versus individual shamanism as the primary function for the imagery represented in the Coso Representational Style petroglyph complex in the Coso Range of eastern California.]
2007 Archaeology and Rock Art in the Eastern Sierra and Great Basin Frontier. Maturango Museum Publication Number 22. Maturango Museum, Ridgecrest. [Lightly edited version of Garfinkel's Ph.D. dissertation. First detailed synthesis of far southern Sierra and eastern California prehistory. Focuses on ethnic identification of archaeological patterns and the timing and explanation of hypothesized prehistoric population movements based on linguistic prehistory.]
Garfinkel, Alan and Don Austin 2011 Reproductive Symbolism in Great Basin Rock Art: Bighorn Sheep Hunting, Fertility, and Forager Ideology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 21(3):453-471.
Garfinkel, Alan P., Donald R. Austin, David Earle, and Harold Williams 2009 Myth, Ritual and Rock Art: Coso Decorated Animal-Humans and the Animal Master. Rock Art Research 26(2). [The Journal of the Australian Rock Art Research Association (AURA)and of the International Federation of Rock Art Organization (IFRAO)]
Garfinkel, Alan P. and J. Kenneth Pringle Dating the Rock Drawings of the Coso Range: Projectile Point Petroglyphs in American Indian Rock Art Volume 30, James T. O'Connor, editor, pp. 1–14. Tucson: American Rock Art Research Association. R, A, I Enhanced on-line version available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20040829010143/http://petroglyphs.us/article_dating_coso_projectile_point_petroglyphs.htm [Documents petroglyphs in the Coso Range with associated images of dart or arrow points and argues that they most likely represent Elko and Humboldt Basal Notched forms dating the glyphs to a time from calibrated 2000 BC to AD 1. ]
Garfinkel, Alan P., David A. Young, and Robert M. Yohe, II 2010 Bighorn Hunting, Resource Depression, and Rock Art in the Coso Range of Eastern California: A Computer Simulation Model. Journal of Archaeological Science 37:42-51.
