Navajo
Rock Art & Pueblitos
Fours-Corners holds secrets of Navajo history
by George Oxford Miller
Some of the most dramatic art galleries in New Mexico aren't in Santa Fe, nor are their priceless masterpieces stored in hermetically sealed vaults for safekeeping. The petroglyph images on canyon-wall galleries near Farmington have been exposed to the blazing sun and torrential storms of the Southwest for 300 years. Yet, the centuries have not dimmed the life that seems to jump off the rocks at the viewer.
An hour's drive from Farmington on a web of dusty, unmarked roads takes us across a cottonwood-lined wash in Largo Canyon to the Crow Canyon Archeology Site. A cliff face of gleaming reddish-brown rocks borders a low mesa that rises to distant cliffs and blue sky. These scenic rocks and canyons hold the story of a little-known era in Navajo history.
"We're in the heart of Dinétah, the ancestral Navajo homeland from the 1500s to the late 1700s," Larry Baker, our guide and director of Salmon Ruins Museum tells us. "The Navajo left the area about 1770 and moved to their present location. The petroglyphs here are like stained glass windows in churches. The Navajos were saying, 'This is my land, my culture, my religion.' The images represent some of their earliest creation stories."
We walk along the promontory and round a corner to discover the Sistine Chapel of rock art. Panels of intricately carved figures and images stretch along the sheer wall. A life-sized corn stalk highlights one mural and realistic carvings of a warrior with a headdress and bow and arrows decorate another. We see drawings of bison and elk impaled with arrows, of birds, clan symbols, mysterious deities, and a set of concentric circles.
"On the equinox, the sun's shadow cuts through the center of the circles," Baker explains. He points to a beautifully carved warrior image. "The figure holding the bow and arrows with the headdress represents Monster Slayer, one of the Hero Twins at the time of creation. The monster's body became Mount Taylor and his blood the El Malpais lava flow." The western New Mexico mountain is sacred to the Navajo and forms the southeast boundary of Dinétah.
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