Waddell, Arizona

This week, Jen H. asks us to share a symbol and explain its meaning. You can view the entire challenge post here. I can share many symbols with you, and I can tell you what they mean to me, but I can’t tell you their original meaning.

In the White Tank Mountains, just west of Phoenix, Arizona, archeologists have discovered much evidence left by early inhabitants of the area. These native Americans lived 700 to 800 years or more. Visitors to the mountains and to the White Tank Mountains Regional Park will find many examples of the symbol language etched into the rock faces. Experts say some of the petroglyphs are upwards of 10,000 years old, but many are at least 700-800 years old.

Those ancient Arizonans are known as the Hohokam, and a small village and its remnants are obvious to the trained eye, yet the casual hiker will only recognize the symbols etched into the rock face. No one really knows what the symbols mean, but archeologists know they were important communications in the lives of the artists who created them. They are not stone age graffiti, more likely they are symbols that recorded important events and marked locations. Some symbols may have been religious in nature.

There are those who speculate that these images were created by alien life forms that visited our planet centuries ago. I say to that simply, any alien life form that has the technology to travel through interstellar space would have tools to leave their messages in a more sophisticated fashion than etching images into rock faces. Jus’ sayin’.

The gallery of images included features just a small sampling of petroglyphs I have seen on our hikes in the White Tank Mountains.

John Steiner