archaeological mutants

swordwhalewalking · Post by **swordwhalewalking** » Mon Aug 11, 2003 3:53 am

Anybody read Uncanny 421 and 422? That's the one where Kurt and Co. are exploring archaeological ruins (which turn out to be something called Isla de Demonas)...there's a wall with a blue tailed guy on it, resembling Our Hero of course. Cool idea, ancient mutants. Fiction, but cool fiction.

Non-fiction; yesterday I'm in the middle of the Susquehanna River (it flows out of New York state, through Pennsylvania and into the Chesapeake Bay), just south of the Safe Harbor dam, just north of the Maryland border. Myself and eight other kayakers are "the Raiders of the Lost Rock"...searching for one of several tiny rocky islands in the center of the river that have Native American petroglyphs on them. These rock drawings were carved into the stone perhaps thousands of years ago. They've withstood flood, dams, ice, river debris, and the odd bit of graffitti.
They were first recorded by people other than the Native folk in the 1800's, there are a few books and drawings and photos, and one of our paddlers knew how to find them...more or less. When he couldn't, (he['d seen them last about 30 years earlier) we split up and explored. Two buddies and I took off down the river to a big honkin rock in the middle, they went river right and I went river left around the rock, looked up and whoa...is that something in the smooth surface of the rock?
It was; there were several petroglyphs, thunderbirds, guys with bunny ears, a strange thing on a rocker, an X (the center of a medicine wheel type design?), and this little guy with the tail, who looked (perhaps with a slight stretch of the imagination)kind of familiar ...

this is a rough sketch from my dive slate, which I carry on my kayak for field notes and sketches, but it's accurate as to what I saw...

swordwhalewalking · Post by **swordwhalewalking** » Mon Aug 11, 2003 3:55 am

Ok, couldn't figure out how to post all these at once..here's the whole slate with all the petroglyphs;

Gaz · Post by **Gaz** » Mon Aug 11, 2003 3:58 am

That's wicked cool! And wicked coincidental! Maybe the bunny ear dude way 'Bunny Man!!! Mutant with the ability to... eat Carrots!!!'

Neon · Post by **Neon** » Mon Aug 11, 2003 4:17 am

... or maybe the thunderbird is actually a phoenix?

Err... maybe not.

That's awesome that you had the chance to catch a glimpse of them. Do you have any idea of the age of the petroglyphs? I'm not very familiar with the history of that area.

jogurt · Post by **jogurt** » Mon Aug 11, 2003 9:59 am

http://rockart.uark.edu/human.html
was some like this?

NightPoofer · Post by **NightPoofer** » Mon Aug 11, 2003 10:32 pm

I thought there always were ancient mutants! Look at Apocalypse! he's over 5000 years old!

fuzzy_lambada_dancer · Mon Aug 11, 2003 10:36 pm

Woah. That's so cool! I wonder what it all means.....maybe the artist was Dave in a past life!

swordwhalewalking · Post by **swordwhalewalking** » Tue Aug 12, 2003 4:21 pm

Hey, thanks for the linkie to the rock art page. Here's one for our petroglyphs! Found this after I posted!

http://www.thelondonderryschool.org/cla ... glyphs.htm

And here is the page I got as a search engine: contains many sites about our glyphs:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=slv1& ... usquehanna

Someone on our trip had a book published locally about these specific petroglyphs. I kind of scanned through it quickly (fighting off the mutant gnat and no-see-um scourge as I read), and seem to remember they are hard to date as they are on a rock in the middle of the river. In other sites, you'd have lodge poles or campfire debris (ie; carbon) for carbon-dating. Someone had carved a giant "dove of peace" on the same rock (

) recently, and you could see the huge difference in weathering. The dove was sharp and crisp-edged, while the Native petroglyphs were smooth and worn. (I'm thinking we're talking thousands of years old, not mere hundreds). The more recent local cultures were Algonquian and Iroquois.

Earlier explorers used chalk to make them stand out, so they could photograph them (in the late 1800's). We didn't have chalk or rubbing paper, but I discovered that if you dampened a bilge sponge (the one you keep in the bottom of your boat to remove the bits of water that get in) and wiped it over the rock, the pale glyphs would stand out against the dark, wet rock.

Several of our crew had cameras (mine was a cheezy throwawy with a non-functional flash) and took pics. Hopefully I'll get some decent pics from someone, if not my own.

So far on any of the sites devoted to the petroglyphs, I have not seen Big Indian Rock, which was, apparently our rock.

The "Nightcrawler" glyph is shown looking a hair different in the book...he looks more like a guy with a bow. I drew the one on the slate precisely how he looked, so the illo in the book may have weathered, or the artist goobered.

The anthropomorphic human (guy with animal characteristics, pointy ears, tails etc.) is as old as time.

sevati · Post by **sevati** » Tue Aug 12, 2003 5:45 pm

That's very interesting. I'm just as mad as you that someone would ruin a historical piece such as that with graffiti.

jerks...

Nightmare · Post by **Nightmare** » Wed Aug 20, 2003 5:42 pm

Anyway you can go back with a digital camera? I'd love to see actually photos of it...

Siona · Post by **Siona** » Wed Aug 20, 2003 6:15 pm

Ugh, here in UT, you find that kinda bullshit EVERYWHERE. It's sad to think that the people I used to admire are acting younger than me.

~Siona

swordwhalewalking · Post by **swordwhalewalking** » Tue Aug 26, 2003 3:03 pm

Aha!

The photos are back! Despite the grey day (Thunderbird threatening to blast us with lightning bolts...where's Storm when you need her?) and the dysfunctional flash, some piccies came out! The only shot I got of the "Nightcrawler" glyph is very lacking in contrast, but the others are good. I'll have to log time on a buddy's computer rather than the one in the library to upload...