How line begins
Point of waking
NOTES
-- 1st photo, Old dots/pits with more recent bighorn motif
-- 3rd photo, with details following 4th & 5th.
-- Final photo: Bear paws motif, edge of crack in rim
Memory deflects, time becomes duration.
Petroglyphs in/on basalt, Infinity Playa, Warner Valley uplands.
Photos June 2023.
“Although clearly representational, the deer carvings at Dunchraigaig are nevertheless as ambiguous as the abstract cup-and-ring motifs in this area. Their meaning and purpose are as obscured and restricted to us as their physical location within the cist.” Revealing, 2022
“The discovery also reinforces the special character of Kilmartin Glen as one of the most original and remarkable Neolithic–Bronze Age landscapes of monumentality and rock art in Britain.” Revealing, 2022.
Below, schematic of carvings which the study determined were made on the stone sometime before placed as the cairn capstone.
Deer carvings are rare among the thousands of petroglyphs in the Northern Great Basin. Pictured below, three who have encountered me traipsing in basalt-rimmed sage-lands of southern Oregon. As imaging and imagining, compare or align with the Kilmartin deer carvings. How do you see?
NOTES & LINKS
— Revealing the Earliest Animal Engravings in Scotland: The Dunchraigaig Deer, Kilmartin. The 2022 study by Joana Valdez-Tullett and Tertia Barnett and team from Scotland’s Rock Art Project
— Prehistoric animal carvings discovered for the first time in Scotland. May 2021 New release with links to images of digital scans.
— Dunchraigaig: Cairn (Bronze Age), Carved Stone (Prehistoric)
— An Animate Landscape: Rock Art and the Prehistory of Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland (2011). Andrew Meirion Jones and team.
“The Kilmartin landscape in western Scotland is widely regarded as Scotland's richest prehistoric landscape. It contains a number of barrow cemeteries, stone alignments, stone circles and a henge. With over 250 individual rock art sites, it also has the greatest concentration of prehistoric rock art in the British Isles and some of the most impressive rock art sites.”
Petroglyph located within Paradise North, a Special Use Airspace (SUA) of Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Paradise North — also known as Owyhee Canyonlands in Malheur County, Oregon.
Map
indicates SUA sectors of the Military Operations Area (MOA) in Oregon,
idaho and Nevada. BLUE star locates petroglyphs and canyonlands in all
photos (DB) click to enlarge.
The Department of the Air Force (DAF) produced thousands of pages as Final Environmental Impact Statement for Airspace Optimization for Readiness for Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho
Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA): “Air Force’s plan will increase the number of booming super-sonic flights over southeastern Oregon by 316 percent, to 6,894 flights per year, while allowing jets to fly just 100 feet off the ground!” Threats to the Owyhee Canyonlands
DAF: Jet flights 100 Feet above ground level (AGL): "No adverse effects to archaeological or architectural resources and ... no effect on traditional cultural properties" in the SUA. Executive Summary of Final EIS
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Meanwhile, In Nevada just west of Paradise South: Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. RED star on map above.
General Motors (GM) and Lithium Americas (Canadian corp) will invest $650 million to develop "the largest known source of lithium in the United States and the third largest in the world."
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Opposed by Protect Thacker Pass and Paiute and Shoshone people of three Native Tribes: Reno-Sparks Indian Colony; Burns Paiute Tribe; Winnemucca Indian Colony.
Remembering how President and
former general Dwight Eisenhower, in this farewell address, January
17, 1961, warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial
complex."
Clear enough. We've been warned. Complexes mutate, proliferate, optimize, establish as Military-Extraction-Capitalist readiness variants.
Yet, these marked stones endure in deepening witness, as they have for thousands of turnings around the sun.
In sum, an encompassing scholarly perspective:
The desert exists at the complex intersection of nature, history, and power, though too often it has been imagined and imaged flatly: reduced to an instrument of the state that upholds political and economic power structures. Thinking more expansively about deserts requires a shift to epistemological and ontological frameworks that honor and prioritize a future for dry environments that is anti-colonial, socially and environmentally just, and multidimensional.
— Danika Cooper, from “Drawing Deserts, Making Worlds,” in Deserts Are Not Empty, Samia Henni, ed.(2022)
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