“Ghostly Goat” Pictographs

These pictographs are found on the ceiling of a low rock shelter. This site is in a drainage in the Eastern Sierra, in Kawaiisu territory. The shelter is much too low to be comfortable for sitting in, but the ceiling is blacked, I assume by soot!

The elements are fairly sparse, in red and black. Let’s take a look.

Peering in towards the back of the shelter. Not a lot of clearance in here!

If you squirm around and look back to the entrance you’ll see it is worth the crawl, though! There are pictographs on the ceiling.

Except for the white element, the pictographs can be kind of hard to see until your eyes adjust to the dim light. Here you can see the white element and three red ones.

With DStretch. There’s a little dab of red on the lower right, and a little speck of white above it. The two T-shaped elements were easy to see with the naked eye, but with DStretch we see that there’s a third one to the right of the bisected circle as well.

The ceiling from a different angle. There is also a small oval element in white down below the red speck we saw in the previous photo.

This bisected circle element is ubiquitous in the southern Great Basin and Mohave desert. It crops up very frequently in petroglyphs, and also in pictographs, where it seems to be invariably painted in red.

There’s our ghostly goat! I’m actually not sure that this pictograph is meant to be zoomorphic, but it’s a fun story.

The “appendages” of the element are bifurcated. You have to look really closely at the middle two to see that. The rightmost part, or the “head” if you think of this as a grazing goat, is not bifurcated.

One last look at the “goat” before I wriggle out of here. There’s a little dab of red by its “neck” and now that we’re really leaning in we can see some faint white lines in front of it, too.

There, they show up a little better now. Is this a goat grazing in an enclosure? Probably not, but that’s what it kind of looks like!

This site is quite small but I never get tired of finding pigment on rocks. I hoped you enjoyed seeing it, too.

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