Erractics: Three Puget Sound Petroglyph Boulders

… pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired. —Jeanette Winterson

 

Thinking of rocks as verbs is like seeing a painting, not merely as an object that is, but as the manifestation of the motions that led to its creation. —Marcia Bjornerud

The three most significant petroglyph boulders in southern Puget Sound are tidal, today at sea level. All three are glacial erratics, boulders moving hundreds of miles on ice sheets, arriving on these shores millennia before the carvers marked them. Two are granite erratics; another (Agate Point) is fine-grained gray-green sandstone.

Surging tides, flowing water, wave action, and, in one case the physical relocation of the boulder, continue to reshape the markings and how they are seen and imagined.  Researchers have also affected physical change through rubbings, castings, and removal of barnacles - indeed, barnacles for decades have encrusted the Agate Point boulder (below) to near obscurity. (First photo: backside looking toward the sound)

 

(Above: T-shirt images carvings known from earlier studies.) 

 

The Suquamish and Squaxin Island tribes have more recently taken strong public interest in the cultural importance of the boulders.
Below, one of three boulders, originally from Harstine Island, called the Love Rock by the tribe, is now a centerpiece of the Squaxin Island Tribe’s Veterans Memorial near Shelton.

And now my thought roams far
beyond my hear; my mind
flows out to the water,
soars above the whale’s path
to the wide world’s corners
and returns with keen desire;
the lone bird, flying, shrieks
and leads the willing soul
to the whale-road, and over
the tumbling of the waves.
— The Seafarer (Anglo-Saxon)

NOTES
— Photos: DB, several years ago during tidal explorations. Defined by tides through time:, the clarity and power of these faces and eyes and other forms convey a compelling presence – … living as they ever did.
— Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (1997)

— Marcia Bjornerud, in Wrinkled Time: The persistence of past worlds on earth from Emergence Magazine, V.5 (2024)

— Further: Marian Smith (1946), Edward Meade (1971), Beth Hill and Ray Hill (1974), Richard McClure (1978), Klaus Wellman (1979), and Daniel Leen (1981) have published photos or drawings of the petroglyphs; Leen’s overview in particular is a considered and comprehensive summary.  
 

CODA
Erratic Boulder.
What an extraordinary place
to settle on,
on a ledge, poised
on the brink.
Don't you value your own success?
— Olav H Hauge (Norwegian)