I’ve had a love affair with petroglyphs for
decades, to the point that I spent one Thanksgiving weekend on a petroglyph hunt in Southern Arizona. I took hundreds of photos, marveling at the difference between the glyphs there versus the ones I’d seen in Northern Arizona and New Mexico. The image above was taken at the Crane Petroglyph Heritage Site located just east of Sedona.
Back in 2014, I had the opportunity to visit the Crane site, which features more than 1,000 petroglyphs done in what is known as the Beaver Creek Style. Thought to be done by the Sinagua band, one of the thirteen panels includes - not surprisingly - a solar calendar. The hike in is an easy half-mile over even ground.
Returning to these sites has been on my mind lately, but with temperatures in Phoenix soaring to 110 degrees F right now, our Arizona trip will have to wait til autumn. The good news is, the desire to go there reminded me of a deck I received years ago from Jessica Macbeth. Called Hands of the Ancients (Jan Wright), it’s a twenty-two card deck featuring petroglyphs from sites all over the Southwest.
Since I had a burning question in mind, and glyphs have been on my mind, this is the deck I chose to use.
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