Primitive man knew the terrain and could access the most inaccessible places.” The problem is that you’d have to be a rock climber and risk your life to find it. “I could show you a waterfall in Berlin, N.H., where there could be some. “You want to find rock art?” says paleontologist R. Even so, although there is probably undiscovered art out near, few folks who tour our high, lonesome ridges and peaks have an eye for it. The same can be said of ledge overhangs known as rock shelters, particularly those situated along the ancient Lake Hitchcock shoreline, as well as mountain caves, many of which could be hidden under rockslides. The problem is that these images, which can date back thousands of years, are by now worn or covered with moss, lichen or you name it, and not something your average person is apt to recognize when fishing, canoeing, hunting or hiking along such streams. Other likely petroglyph sites are watersheds draining into the major arteries, especially those that dump in near important seasonal fishing sites. Remember, rivers like the Hudson, Connecticut, Merrimack, Penobscot, Saco and many others were our native peoples’ interstate highways when Europeans arrived on the scene. These shamanistic images show up throughout the Northeast, around lakes and ponds and especially near important riverside gathering places at waterfalls and mouths of rivers, where you’re apt to find carvings of fish, eels, serpents, thunderbirds, effigies, maybe deer or elk or moose, scratched into large stones and ledges, including midstream outcroppings splitting a river, and others jutting far out from the shoreline to provide natural entry and exit points for ancient canoe travelers. Lenik, author of “Picture Rocks: American Indian Rock Art in the Northeast Woodlands (2002),” the most likely sites are around water. Now we’re left to ponder how many are still decipherable and where do you suppose they reside? The answer is that one never knows.Īccording to Edward F. Petroglyphs and pictographs here in the Pioneer Valley? Well, there is no question they were here.
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