This pictograph site, in Kawaiisu territory, is one I’ve had my eye on for a while. Finally, we had a good opportunity to stop by, so we examined maps, punched some coordinates into the GPS, and set off.
We were poking around in the Eastern Sierra foothills one spring day, looking for pictographs, and found a nice little site tucked away in a wide canyon.
First we found some big slabs of granite poking out of the dirt downslope with plenty of bedrock mortars on the exposed surfaces. Then, when we turned around to look at the slope above us, a prominent rock formation caught our eye.
We thought to ourselves: well, maybe we are not the first people attracted to it … so we climbed up to it to took a look, and we found a small pictograph site!
The pictograph site in Burham Canyon is well-known and easy to find – and it shows. Fresh dirt bike tracks run right up to it and empty Coors Light cans are wedged into the cracks in the rock outcropping.
This site is located in the middle of some suburban sprawl to the west of Tehachapi. The site was brought public attention by 14-year old Jennifer Dellons in the 1970’s, via a letter she wrote to UCLA because she was concerned that the site might be damaged or destroyed by the development springing up around it. Her letter helped made sure that the site was recorded and preserved.
The meaning of Native American rock art is poorly understood. The ethnographic record, combined with thoughtful research, have suggested meanings to us – some still considered current, others fallen out of favor: boundary markers, hunting magic, shamanistic recordings of vision quests, markings for shaman’s caches … there is a long list of possible interpretations.
Part of the debate is whether pictograph and petroglyph sites were held sacred, created in hidden corners of the world, or whether they shared living space with the people who created them.
The Ayers Rock pictographs, or Bob Rabbit pictographs, as they are also known after the Kawaiisu shaman purported to have created them, consists of three panels painted on different sides of an enormous monolith at the southern foot of a boulder-strewn hill.
The pictograph boulder, seen from the north. There is a single pictograph in the alcove on the right, and a panel in the center recess.
Bob Rabbit was well-known as a “weather shaman”, or ̉uupuhagadi – which may be more accurately translated as “weather manipulator”.