I’m still having a vacation hangover, so I gotta show you some stuff I learned while traveling through the Indian Lands of Arizona and Utah. I learned that there are basically two kinds of rock art found in the Southwest: pictographs and petroglyphs. Pictographs are made from a variety of substances painted onto the rocks - they listed urine and blood among the substances the natives painted - weird, but whatever. Petroglyphs are etchings scratched or pounded into the patina deposited on the rocks.

In the Flash® animation above, you will notice a pictograph of the sun and a prominence. It fades into a petroglyph with images of animals, natives, stars, tools and an early cartoon of Bart Simpson in the lower right corner. Finally, the images will alternate until you put your mouse cursor over them, when you will see an amazing combination of both techniques that we discovered in Washington, UT. There is conjecture that this interesting combination may not have come from the early natives, but I’ll let you decide on that.