Famous Utah Rock Art May Be Thousands of Years Younger Than Was Thought

One of the most iconic works of Ancient American art is likely hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years younger than was previously believed, according to new research. The giant display of ghostly, larger-than-life-size, ochre-colored figures painted on a remote sandstone wall in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park is considered the defining example of a rock art technique known as the Barrier Canyon Style. The style, recognized by its wraith-like, often limbless, anthropomorphic figures painted on a heroic scale, is found throughout the Colorado Plateau. But since the original Barrier Canyon panel, known as the Great Gallery, was first discovered by scientists in the 1920s, experts have debated how old the images are, and what culture created them. Some archaeologists have theorized that the rock art may be as much as 4,000 to 7,000 years old. But new chemical analysis of the Great Gallery, combined with some other geological detective work, suggests it was painted much more recently, and may even be little more than 1,000 years old. “The painting of the Great Gallery occurred during a window between late Archaic time, around A.D. 1, through the introduction of maize and the bow and arrow to Utah, and on to the peak of the Fremont culture A.D. ∼1100,” writes a team of archaeologists in today’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While the team limited its research to the famous Great Gallery, they say that their findings may have important implications for the origins of the Barrier Canyon Style. If their data are correct, they say, the rise of this style of art may coincide with the advent of agriculture in the northern Four Corners region, perhaps inspired or influenced by immigrants from the south who introduced farming to the area...more